This is useful pedagologically because a lot of the important features of cosmology are gravity model independent. If you want to get super-hand-wavy you can do cosmology is a Newtonian framework and then talk about how GR is different. Get a "hand waving" explanation for the Friedmann equations, once you have that then you can learn the physics concepts, and once you have that, then you can go back to the Friedmann equations, and look at the GR issues in more depth (or not). Don't go too deep into General Relativity. ![]() That's one piece of advice that I'd give someone that wants a quick start to cosmology. He states that they can be derived from the Einstein field equations for the case of an isotropic and homogeneous world model, but does not bother to do so himself. He spends one chapter giving a fairly perfunctory overview of GR, and then introduces the Friedmann equations in the next chapter. To the OP: for now, if you accept the Friedmann equations as a given, and if you are fairly well-versed in differential equations and calculus, then I think that this might be a good place to start, and you can get pretty far in understanding the properties of the world models and what they predict, as well as a good review of observational cosmology. ![]() It's sort of at the level of "cosmology for observational astronomers." He spends one chapter giving a fairly perfunctory overview of GR, and then introduces the Friedmann equations in the next chapter. For a treatment that is even simpler still, I find that the chapters on cosmology from Galaxy Formation by Malcolm S. I like aspects of Dodelson as well, although it has its drawbacks. It would be so much better if instead we could pool together related knowledge from a bunch of different sources, allowing one to build on one's knowledge incrementally without having to search endlessly to find out which book has the background you need to understand the current one that you're supposed to be reading. Every author tries to keep re-inventing the wheel, thinking that their text will be the best and most self-contained to date (at least for the audience and purpose they are targeting). We haven't got there yet, but we are really, really, really close. The barriers are legal and administrative. The frustrating thing is that there is no technological barrier. The thing that no one has done (and Wikipedia has gotten closer than anyone else) is to actually work out the links themselves. More seriously, the "click one piece of text to get to some other text" problem has been solved. At the time (and this was in 1989 and involved one of Weinberg's earlier books), I wished someone would invent something where you could read the text of a book, and if there was something that you didn't understand, you could click on the text and some page in some other book would come up and explain to you what you didn't understand, and if you didn't understand that, you'd keep clicking until you found something that makes sense.Īnyone hear of any sort of invention like that? Tougher than anything, except the book you're aiming to read. ![]() I remember haunting the university library and looking through dozens of books in desperate search of some "hand holding", and mathematical background for just about every page of Weinberg. So if you haven't encountered that kind of geometry before you need to either (i) accept it and move quietly on or (ii) dig into Weinberg's references. For instance, look at the second equation in G&C - it shows the distance between two points in a non-Euclidean geometry, with *no* hand-holding. G & C itself requires a lot of background, or at least a lot of "mathematical maturity". But there are many others! If you look at the first chapter of "Cosmology" in "Look inside" you see that to understand the derivation of equation 1.1.3 you need to understand G & C up to section 13.2. I sweated over Weinberg's other book on this subject for my MSc project in Astronomy - that's "Gravitation and Cosmology". What other math and physics do I need to know?Īlso what math does Cosmology employ most? I'm going to read this College Physics text first by SerwayĪnd I will have a good grasp of calculus soon. I think I'm going to read this text:Ĭosmology by Steven Weinberg. What do I need to know before I can study Cosmology.
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