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.
Author Biography:
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
