Jim Peebles
Princeton University
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Jim Peebles
“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.” (from Amazon)
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.