This book offers an alternative to other textbooks on the subject, providing a more specific discussion of numerous general relativistic effects for readers who have knowledge of classical mechanics and electrodynamics, including special relativity. Coverage includes in particular gravitational lensing, signal retardation in the gravitational field of the Sun, the Reissner-NordstrAm solution, selected spin effects, the resonance transformation of an electromagnetic wave into a gravitational one, and the entropy and temperature of black holes. The book includes numerous problems at various levels of difficulty, making it ideal also for independent study by a broad readership of advanced students and researchers.

I.B. Khriplovich is Chief Researcher, Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, and Chair of Theoretical Physics at Novosibirsk University. Dr. Khriplovich is a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has been awarded the Dirac Medal For the advancement of theoretical physics'' by University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and the Pomeranchuk Prize For outstanding contribution to the understanding the properties of the standard model, especially for illuminating work on weak and strong interactions of quarks'' by the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Moscow, Russia.

This book is based on material taught in general and special theoretical physics courses given by I.B. Khriplovich at the Physics Department of Novosibirsk University, Russia. It is assumed that the reader is acquainted with fundamentals of classical mechanics, classical electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and (in the last chapter only) relativistic quantum mechanics. These fundamentals are not discussed explicitly but instead demonstrate, by solving concrete problems, how they work in practice. Indeed, according to Newton, ?in studies of science, examples are more useful than rules.? To the best of Khriplovich's knowledge, most of these problems have never been discussed in textbooks, and it is believed that this is certainly true for the solutions presented. In all the text's discussions, reliance is on intuitive, qualitative arguments, the only exception in this respect being Chapter 4 which contains a consistent presentation of the semiclassical approximation in complex plane.