Fifty Years of Gravitation
I was surprised to discover, a couple of days ago, that the classic textbook Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler is 50 years old this year. MTW as it is usually known was first published in 1973, and has has now been reprinted 24 times. I bought my copy (shown above) about 30 years ago. I’ve often joked that this tome is so hefty that it not only allows one to read about Gravitation but also to experience its practical effects!
This anniversary reminds me that there was a competition running at ITP2022 last year that involved holding out a copy of the book in one hand at arm’s length for as long as possible following the instructions below:
The winner of the competition was John Brennan of Maynooth University, with a time of 3 minutes and 29 seconds. If you can lay your hands on a copy of MTW you can try to do better!
In the Dark 
January 6, 2023 at 1:22 pm
I remember Steve Gull’s comment on MTW: “I thought it couldn’t possibly be that difficult.” The awful free verse didn’t help, either. I much preferred Weinberg’s book.
January 6, 2023 at 2:23 pm
I certainly wouldn’t recommend MTW as an introductory text!
January 6, 2023 at 2:26 pm
Steve is 100% right. MTW was the first book on GR that I ever tried to read. When I saw that there were 382 pages of mathematical preliminaries before starting to discuss gravitational physics, I was hugely discouraged and gave up. This was 1976, and MTW was three years old. Fortunately, in 1974 Harry Atwater had published a little book that set the entire subject out in 221 pages (each with much less text than an MTW page), and from this I realised that the physics was much more accessible than I had supposed. This led me to Weinberg, which still seems to be unique in its physical understanding of the logic that leads from the equivalence principle to the necessary mathematics of GR. Finally, 44 years after I first opened it, I bought my own copy of MTW. Having by then written a 100-page textbook overview of the essentials of GR and having delivered a full lecture course on the subject, I found I was just about in a position to start appreciating it for the first time. They could have saved generations of students much agony by having an entrance exam on the first few pages: “if you can’t do these questions, go away and read another book and come back here when you can”.
January 6, 2023 at 2:39 pm
I did the opposite of you: after several decades I sold my MTW. But, although I’m not involved with GR, I kept my Weinberg, for its beauty.
July 26, 2023 at 5:39 pm
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