ASTR 5770 Fall 2021 Homepage
ASTR 5770 Cosmology Fall 2021: Texts
Text
The lectures in this course will be based to a considerable extent on the proto-book
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General Relativity, Black Holes, and Cosmology
(version of 2021/08/23)
Chapters to be covered:
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1. Special Relativity
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2. Fundamentals of General Relativity
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4. Action principle
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10. Homogeneous, Isotropic Cosmology
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11. The tetrad formalism
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26 and 28–37. Cosmological Perturbations
Some hand-written notes:
The lectures will also use
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Scott Dodelson & Fabian Schmidt (2020)
“Modern Cosmology, 2nd Ed.”
Academic Press,
494 pages.
A hard copy of the book is available in the APS Office.
This is a superb, pedagogically written, graduate level exposition
of the pillars of modern cosmology,
especially the Cosmic Microwave Background.
If you want to learn the subject, this is the book.
The second edition is similar to the first (2003),
somewhat reorganized,
with significant new material on CMB lensing,
and on Large Scale Structure.
Other texts
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Scott Dodelson (2017) “Gravitational Lensing”,
Cambridge University Press,
224 pages.
Another good resource.
Gravitational lensing sees mass
regardless of whether the mass is bright (stars) or not (dark matter),
which makes it a powerful probe of dark matter in the Universe.
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T. Padmanabhan (2010) “Gravitation: Foundations and Frontiers”,
Cambridge University Press,
700 pages,
includes chapters on the CMB power spectrum.
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David H. Lyth & Andrew R. Liddle (2009)
“The Primordial Density Perturbation”,
Cambridge University Press,
497 pages.
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Steven Weinberg (2008)
“Cosmology”,
Oxford University Press,
593 pages.
I get the impression that Weinberg is focused more on teaching himself
than the reader as he cranks through all the equations in gory detail.
On the other hand Weinberg is comprehensive,
and his views are magisterial.
For example, on page 476 he addresses how quantum fluctuations
must somehow decohere to become the classical fluctuations we see today,
an issue I have not seen mentioned in any other text.
Mathematica notebooks
Fall 2021 ASTR 5770 Homepage
Updated 2021 Aug 23