Reddit mentions of Gravitation

> I think you'll be surprised by how much this helps.

I personally only leave gentle, new age/ambient type music (or some gentle classical, etc) channels on at home in the background now. Only rarely bother with a movies, and if I do, it's a DVD I bought from a older movie, usually decades old films. You can completely see the difference between today's filth media, and anything else, even from 20 years ago. It's sickening how bad it's become.

>For example, it's easier than ever to find and buy an old book that you want to read

I've wanted this book for at least 25 years, and just finally got me a copy to read, or at least add to by library for now.

>Also, don't forget that there are still lots of good people out there in the world.

Thanks. I personally needed this.

TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol 1-3, W. Richard Stevens.

The Art of Electronics 3rd Edition, Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill.

Gravitation, Charles W. Misner, John Archibald Wheeler, and Kip Thorne.

"Pure energy"

E = mc^2 means "matter can be converted into energy."

No... just, no.

As for interesting ideas, there's a thought experiment in the famous Gravitation textbook where they imagine a civilization living on the surface of an artificial ring around a rapidly rotating black hole. They drop their garbage into the ergosphere of the black hole and use the Penrose process to extract energy from the rotation of the black hole.

That's just freaking cool! Why hasn't anyone used that idea as a sci-fi setting yet?

Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations for that:
If the black hole is about three solar masses (about the minimum required to form from gravitational collapse), a ring with a radius of about 1000 Earth radii (about 6 million km) would have a surface gravity of about 1g just due to the black hole's gravity. This would be well outside of the radius of the ergosphere (about 10 km). I haven't done the math, but I'm pretty sure it puts you well outside of any significant relativistic effects. And it's still less than 5% of the radius of a Niven ring.

I'm not at this level yet, but Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler is a well known for being a great and thorough book on the subject and you can get a used one for $28.

https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/0691177791#customerReviews

It is also known as MTW Black Book of Gravitation.

I'm no physicist. My degree is in computer science, but I'm in a somewhat similar boat. I read all these pop-science books that got me pumped (same ones you've read), so I decided to actually dive into the math.

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Luckily I already had training in electromagnetics and calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra so I was not going in totally blind, though tbh i had forgotten most of it by the time I had this itch.

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I've been at it for about a year now and I'm still nowhere close to where I want to be, but I'll share the books I've read and recommend them:

• First and foremost, read Feynman's Lectures on Physics and do not skip a lecture. You can find them free on the link there, but they also sell the 3 volumes on amazon. I love annotating so I got myself physical copies. These are the most comprehensible lectures on anything I've ever read. Feynman does an excellent job on teaching you pretty much all of physics + math (especially electromagnetics) up until basics of Quantum Mechanics and some Quantum Field Theory assuming little mathematics background.
  
• Feyman lectures on Quantum Electrodynamics (The first Quantum Field Theory). This is pop-sciency and not math heavy at all, but it provides a good intuition in preparation for the bullet points below
  
• You're going to need Calculus. So if you're not familiar comfortable with integral concepts like integration by parts, Quantum Mechanics will be very difficult.
  
• I watched MIT's opencourseware online lectures on Quantum Mechanics and I did all the assignments. This gave me what I believe is a solid mathematical understanding on Quantum Mechanics
  
• I'm currently reading and performing exercises from this Introduction to Classical Field Theory. . This is just Lagrangian Field Theory, which is the classical analog of QFT. I'm doing this in preparation for the next bullet-point:
  
• Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. Very math heavy - but thats what we're after isnt it? I havent started on this yet since it relies on the previous PDF, but it was recommended in Feynmans QED book.
  
• I've had training on Linear Algebra during my CS education. You're going to need it as well. I recommend watching this linear algebra playlist by 3Blue1Brown. It's almost substitute for the rigorous math. My life would've been a lot easier if that playlist existed before i took my linear algebra course, which was taught through this book.
  
• Linear Algebra Part 2 - Tensor analysis! You need this for General Relativity. This is the pdf im currently reading and doing all the exercises. This pdf is preparing me for...
  
• Gravity. This 1000+ page behemoth comes highly recommended by pretty much all physicist I talk to and I can't wait for it.
  
• Concurrently I'm also reading this book which introduces you to the Standard Model.
  
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  I'm available if you want to PM me directly. I love talking to others about this stuff.

I am literally a physicist and I literally studied those things you're describing (the structure of accretion disks given some stochastic dynamics).

Again. We don't care about the why. We care about the how. And we already know how mass-energy causes spacetime curvature.

Read these, then we will have a discussion about the how of gravitational physics:

https://smile.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/0691177791

https://smile.amazon.com/Introduction-Differential-Geometry-Curves-Surfaces/dp/1546735895

If you want to go down a more unconventional path there's always Gravitation. It's self contained and you'll be learning from the masters.