Product Description

This book is unique in the detailed, self-contained, and comprehensive treatment that it gives to the ideas and formulas that are used and tested in modern cosmological research. It divides into two parts, each of which provides enough material for a one-semester graduate course. The first part deals chiefly with the isotropic and homogeneous average universe; the second part concentrates on the departures from the average universe. Throughout the book the author presents detailed analytic calculations of cosmological phenomena, rather than just report results obtained elsewhere by numerical computation. The book is up to date, and gives detailed accounts of topics such as recombination, microwave background polarization, leptogenesis, gravitational lensing, structure formation, and multifield inflation, that are usually treated superficially if at all in treatises on cosmology. Copious references to current research literature are supplied. Appendices include a brief introduction to general relativity, and a detailed derivation of the Boltzmann equation for photons and neutrinos used in calculations of cosmological evolution. Also provided is an assortment of problems.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #186282 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

Review

"A technical tour de force for the intrepid graduate student, Weinberg's new book will greatly appeal to particle physicists tooling up in cosmology and be an indispensable source for the practitioner."--Physics Today
"A monumental book written by a leading authority in particle physics and cosmology. Since publication of Weinberg's famous book Gravitation and Cosmology 35 years ago, there has been a real revolution both in cosmological theory and observations. A major effort of a great expert has been required to summarize the main developments in one book, and to make this presentation both highly accurate and accessible. This book will be greatly appreciated by a broad readership, ranging from students who just enter the field to experts in modern cosmology. It should be on the desk of every actively working cosmologist."--Andrei Linde, Stanford University
"Time is right for a survey of the physics of what has become a large and well-developed subject. Weinberg has done it, in an impressive fashion. He presents a full and careful assessment of the broad range of physics of modern cosmology, from the tools for measurements of the structure and evolution of the universe we see around us to the puzzles of dark matter and dark energy and the ideas about what the universe was like in the remote past, before it could have been described by the well-tested part of the theory."--Jim Peebles, Princeton University
"This book tackles the main events of today's cosmology: cosmic acceleration observed with supernovae, the exquisite structure of the cosmic microwave background, and the evidence for dark matter. Weinberg pays close attention to the historical development and summarizes the observations with care. He brings deep knowledge of the underlying physics and weaves these threads together into a rich text that will be of great value to astronomers and physicists. The first half of this book is a wonderful introduction to cosmology, suitable for a graduate course or for someone coming into the field from a neighboring region of the scientific forest. The second half is an original development of the theory for the growth of inhomogeneities in the Universe. Everyone who works on cosmology will find something to learn in this book.--Robert P. Kirshner, Harvard University
"The result is a tour de force that even established cosmologists will learn from." - Peter Coles, Science
"Nobel laureate, Steven Weinberg, is known not only for his exceptional contribution to modern physics, but also for his incomparable pen...With his unsurpassed ability to explain even the most difficult mathematical and conceptual steps with a few strokes of his pen, Weinberg takes the reader from the basics of cosmological kinetics and dynamics...to advanced topics."--Mathematical Reviews

About the Author

Professor Steven Weinberg
Jack S. Josey-Welch Foundation Chair in Science and Regental Professor and Director, Theory Research Group
Department of Physics
University of Texas at Austin
Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979
National Medal of Science, 1991
Benjamin Franklin Prize, American Philosophical Society, 2004
Member, U. S. National Academy of Sciences
Foreign Member, Royal Society of London
Honorary Member, Royal Irish Academy
Member, American Philosophical Society
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
J. Robert Oppenheimer Prize, 1973
Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, 1977 Earned degrees
A.B., Cornell University, 1954
Ph.D., Princeton University, 1957
Honorary degrees
Harvard University, A.M., 1973
Knox College, D.Sc., 1978
University of Chicago, Sc.D., 1978
University of Rochester, Sc.D., l979
Yale University, Sc.D., 1979
City University of New York,Sc.D., 1980
Clark University, Sc.D., 1982
Dartmouth College, Sc.D., 1984
Weizmann Institute, Ph.D. Hon.Caus., 1985
Washington College, D.Litt., 1985
Columbia University, Sc.D., 1990
University of Salamanca, Sc.D., 1992
University of Padua, Ph.D. Hon.Caus., 1992
University of Barcelona, Sc.D., 1996
Bates College, Sc. D., 2002
McGill University, Sc. D., 2003
University of Waterloo, Sc. D., 2004

Customer Reviews

A Must have For Every Theoretical Physicist
Wow! This is the first review of the book in the whole of internet (had reviewed it in the amazon.co.uk website). I got a copy of Steven Weinberg's Cosmology two months back though Amazon and am happy! Reminds me of the day back in early 2000 when I pre-ordered Weinberg's Supersymmetry and the day I got it was full of intellectual thrills. All the other texts had a very superficial treatment of Supersymmetry and this was also the case with Cosmology - until now, when the biggest physicist in the post-world-war-2 era wrote on the subject!

Any review of Weinberg's texts is far from complete without having to say something about the Preface. The reader will remember the preface of his book on Gravitation and Cosmology where Weinberg tells us how dissatisfied he was with the usual approach to studying Gravitation and how he sees General Relativity as a consequence of constraints imposed by the quantum theory of massless Spin-2 particles. The reason for Weinberg to write the texts on Quantum Field Theory was also spelled out in the preface - he wanted to address a deep question: "Why Quantum Fields?". In the preface of this book, the author tells us that he wanted to share his experience of learning the latest development of Cosmology, since lots has happened in this area recently. Plus of course, he indirectly (and correctly!) points out how incomplete the usual review articles on Cosmology are.

That indeed is true! And this book precisely will help the reader in learning Cosmology in a way where equations are actually derived and not just mentioned with a reference. Usual treatment of cosmology is vague and superficial and in this text the reader will find not only the full derivation but also good explanations.

The book can be divided in 2 parts. In Chapters 1-4 the reader is introduced to topics ranging from the Robertson-Walker metric to the expanding universe to inflation. The reader has to be familiar with General Relativity to start reading this book. There is a small Appendix in the book on GR: however it should be seen as a write-up for establishing conventions. The remainder of the book (Chapters 5-10) consider advanced topics such as anisotropies, growth of structure and multi-field inflation. Weinberg mentions that he did not want to cover speculative topics and this seems to make sense for such a book. (Though I would have loved a section on the Cosmic Anthropic Principle)

To summarize, this is simply the best reference for Cosmology and Weinberg has once again written a text, noboby else could have.

Excellent, likely the new standard
This book is the most complete and up-to-date book on cosmology I know of. It's extremely well written and very detailed. It's all so good, it's hard to say anything especially stands out. Nevertheless I especially enjoyed the discussions (done throughout the book) of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations, dark matter and dark energy. If you're read authors three volume set on quantum field theory or his graduate level text on gravitation, the writing in this book is exactly what you'd expect.

Obviously one can't understand cosmology without knowledge of general relativity, but this book doesn't require an especially strong knowledge of it. In addition to basic general relativity a couple of other things perspective readers would probably want some background in are statistical mechanics and the standard model of particle physics. The Robertson-Walker solution is pretty much taken as a given, solutions like Taub-NUT that clearly don't describe our universe are not covered. More speculative aspects of cosmology are not discussed. For example you won't find coverage of things like the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, quantum cosmology, non-standard topologies, topological defects (monopoles are mentioned briefly) or higher dimensional theories.

Aside from the speculative topics it covers everything most people would want to know. The topics include: the cosmological distance ladder, the cosmic microwave background, nucleosynthesis, structure formation, inflation, dark matter (baryonic and non-baryonic) and dark energy.

One of the striking features of this book is that it makes it very clear how precise the measurements in cosmology are. One example is Hubble's constant is give as 71+/- 6 (in the usual units), while in Peeble's excellent book (from 1993) was only known to be in the range 50-85. Another is that many measurements have been made to a fairly high precision and they fit together beautifully, the very realistic possibility (if the current model did not reflect reality quite well) that there are some conflicts is not realized.

All-in-all this is an excellent book that I would expect anyone seeking a deep knowledge or cosmology would enjoy. If one's interest in cosmology is more casual it may be too detailed.

Insightful look at modern cosmology
Cosmology has advanced at an extremely rapid pace in the past couple of decades, becoming inextricably linked with particle physics which itself is developing at a dizzying pace. The time is right for a summary of the current situation, bringing together the latest observational findings and theoretical developments in both these fields. There is no better scientist than Weinberg to carry out this task. "Cosmology" nicely complements his earlier, and oft-cited classic, "Gravitation and Cosmology" (1972), in his unique style - an inspiring blend of physical insight and self-contained mathematical derivations. For anyone with a good undergraduate-level understanding of physics, this book provides an excellent entry-point into the vast and rapidly-growing literature on many aspects of modern cosmology, and will position the reader well for understanding the true significance of new findings. With the persistent mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the Large Hadron Collider expected soon to yield results, no time has been better to bring our current understanding of cosmology up to date, and no-one better than Weinberg to accomplish this task.