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Comment by vagab0nd | Hacker News Reader

How does one with good math/physics background gain a deeper understanding of black holes? I'm fascinated by them and want to systematically learn the theory behind it.

My plan is to start with General Relativity and Einstein's equations, maybe some journal articles about black holes. Do you have any suggestions?

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Watch some course lectures on Youtube. Work your way through some books such as by Schutz or Sean Carroll, or if you are brave by Misner, Thorn and Wheeler.

I walked past a guy standing outside the Palo Alto Creamery, and he was reading from a copy of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler -- it's a very distinctive looking book. Turns out he was a guy with a non-math background who had taught himself enough to follow the book. I was impressed!

That book is big enough to visibly distort space-time on its own.

I'm impressed that the reader learned the math on his own. And, uh, what's my excuse?

Carroll is a graduate-level book, and MTW is notorious. I'd start with Hartle, or something even lower-level.

My undergraduate course used Schutz and Carroll. I think, as long as you are comfortable with both proof based and dirty mathematics, you can start with physics grad texts. In fact, a lot of times, the concepts are easier to understand with more conceptually elegant mathematics.

I would also recommend "The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time" by Hawking and Ellis. It uses some advanced mathematics and some prior knowledge of GR, at least at the level of Schutz or Carroll, is needed, but it is a wonderful book to learn about the global structure of spacetimes with black holes, singularity theorems and so on.

Make sure you have Special Relativity down pat beforehand, both intuitively and in terms of math.

Sun sheds light.

Black hole sucks light.

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