Cosmology

Tutorials

• Curved Space and the Metric
• Summary of the Robertson-Walker Metric
• The Friedman equation. Overview of the terms in the equation, with an interactive Java applet to plot solutions.
• Bad Cosmology  A discussion of frequent misconceptions in cosmology,  by both beginning students and textbooks.

Textbooks

• An Introduction to the Science of Cosmology by D. J. Raine and E. G. Thomas. See my list of corrections to it!
• An Introduction to Modern Cosmology, 2nd Edition by Andrew Liddle.
• Cosmology, 3rd Edition by Michael Rowan-Robinson. Web page contains a few errata.
• Cosmological Physics by John Peacock. Errata, plus some updated figures. NB: most errata fixed in 5th reprint.

Cosmology resources at other web sites

• Andrew Hamilton's special relativity tutorial recommended for very useful animated graphics.
• Quick summary of cosmology from my DRAGNs site.
• Glossary of astronomical terms from my DRAGNs site, including a summary of the Cosmological distance ladder.
• Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial. Includes a more detailed (and illustrated) overview of the distance ladder, and a quick introduction to relativity (Galilean to the General theory in 10 minutes!). See also Prof. Wright's Java demo of the expanding Universe.
• MAP Cosmology 101 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. (This is part of the web site for the new MAP satellite, which biases it a bit, but you can take that into account).
• MacTutor History of Mathematics archive at St. Andrews... they have a very generous definition of "mathematician" which includes many astronomers, physicists and cosmologists. An ideal jumping-off point for looking into the history of Cosmology.
• Level 5 Basics of Cosmology at Caltech. Level 5 is a collection of on-line documents from the professional astronomical literature, covering galaxies and cosmology. This link contains a number of overviews on the current status of Cosmology, aimed mainly at beginning graduate students. These will make most sense if you look at them when our course is nearly over, (so you are on top of the jargon). They give you some idea of the range of opinions in the field. Recommended are articles by Turner and Peebles on Is Cosmology Solved? a 1998 "debate" where there wasn't much disagreement (both sides answer "Not yet but maybe soon"), and for contrast M. J. Disney on The Case against Cosmology (published in 2000).
•  History of the Universe  in 200 Words or Less by Eric Schulman.

Essays

• Infinity and Eternity of the Universe

  How did an infinite universe come to seem like a good idea?
• The Golden Age of Cosmology

  My take on recent claims that cosmology is nearly "solved".
• Einstein's Greatest Blunder

  Was it really the Cosmological Constant?