Exploring Black Holes, Second Edition

The first edition of Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity, authored by Oersted Medal winner Edwin Taylor and foremost relativist John Archibald Wheeler, offered a concise, directed examination of general relativity and black holes. Its goal was to provide tools that motivate students to become active participants in carrying out their own investigations about curved spacetime near Earth and black holes. To that end, the book used calculus and algebra, rather than tensors, to make general relativity accessible to second- and third-year students.

In this second edition -- labeled EBH2e -- coauthor Edmund Bertschinger joins Edwin F. Taylor to revise and expand the first edition. The text uses the properties of non-spinning and spinning black holes to introduce Albert Einstein's theory of curved spacetime and applies the resulting general relativity to the Universe around us.

There is no published hard copy textbook of EBH2e. Instead, you may freely download the online version through the links below for personal and class use. For full details, download the README file below.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Also available for full download on the Internet Archive.

"Everything important is,
at bottom, utterly simple."
John Archibald Wheeler

"The second edition of Exploring Black Holes is a remarkable achievement…there is really nothing else like it. Professors and students who would like a first look, or perhaps a different look, at the wonders of general relativity would do well to spend time with this wonderful gift."
American Journal of Physics