A Reader's Companion to Dirac's "General Theory of Relativity" Paperback – December 16, 2025

Dirac's "General Theory of Relativity" is a concise treatise on one of the most beautiful theories of physics. Despite its economy of words, absence of pictures, and penchant for mathematical elegance, Dirac's text is remarkably accessible and its thirty-five brief chapters easily digestible. Dirac develops the essential ideas of general relativity in a mere 69 pages, deriving a number of results using novel and elegant techniques.This "companion" gives the reader a little help to unpack Dirac's ideas and methods, creating a somewhat gentler introduction to general relativity, but based on Dirac's approach to the subject. Although Dirac's text is eminently readable, it is obviously terse and makes demands of the reader. Gaps in the derivation of a mathematical equation or a physical law come in two varieties: the kind where the reader has difficulty getting from one step to the next because some details are omitted, and the kind where the reader gets from one step to the next too easily, again because certain details have been stealthily omitted. A large part of this book is occupied with helping the reader bridge gaps of the first kind. A number of subtle gaps of the second kind are also identified and explained in detail.This book will enable an undergraduate physics student to read Dirac's "General Theory of Relativity" from cover to cover. The only prerequisites are a basic knowledge of linear algebra and vector calculus. Read more