Selected Product:
| Modern Cosmology
Hardcover
Edition: 1
Author: Scott Dodelson
Publisher: Academic Press
Release Date: 2003-03-07
ISBN-10: 0122191412
ISBN-13: 9780122191411
List Price: $82.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Modern Cosmology begins with an introduction to the smooth, homogeneous universe described by a Friedman-Robertson-Walker metric, including careful treatments of dark energy, big bang nucleosynthesis, recombination, and dark matter. From this starting point, the reader is introduced to perturbations about an FRW universe: their evolution with the Einstein-Boltzmann equations, their generation by primordial inflation, and their observational consequences. These consequences include the anisotropy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) featuring acoustic peaks and polarization, the matter power spectrum with baryonic wiggles, and their detection via photometric galaxy surveys, redshift distortions, cluster abundances, and weak lensing. The book concludes with a long chapter on data analysis.
Modern Cosmology is the first book to explain in detail the structure of the acoustic peaks in the CMB, the E/B decomposition in polarization which may allow for detection of primordial gravity waves, and the modern analysis techniques used on increasingly large cosmological data sets. Readers will gain the tools needed to work in cosmology and learn how modern observations are rapidly revolutionizing our picture of the universe.
• Provides foundations, calculations, and interpretations which illuminate current thinking in cosmology
• Covers the major advances in cosmology over the past decade
• Includes over 100 unique, pedagogical figures
Understanding, not just pretty pictures.
| Customer Rating: | | I am enjoying this book a great deal. I enjoy the images we get from Hubble and other sources as much as anyone, but understanding comes from math. Things always seem more clear to me once I understand the equations. BTW my math skills are rudimentary relative to professionals scientists. |
The best book on graduate cosmology.
| Customer Rating: | I am currently teaching graduate cosmology. Modern cosmology is an extraordinarily beautiful piece of physics that has allowed cosmologists to learn from observations fundamental facts about our universe. Graduate students want to understand this beautiful subject themselves. Dodelson's book is the one that delivers that understanding. Of the several graduate cosmology texts out there, this one is unquestionably the best.
The book is uncompromisingly a graduate level text. The material is intrinsically hard, but Dodelson does a remarkable job of taking the reader through it. The problem sets at the end of each chapter (some with solutions) are well thought out, and fill in many gaps. Each chapter concludes with a thoughtful summary and a guide to further reading. If you are going to teach a graduate level cosmology class with this book, then you should impress on your students that the text is not easy, but it's the real unwatered-down thing. |
Great text
| Customer Rating: | | I haven't used another cosmology text for comparison, but have been very pleased with this one. The text is everywhere clear, reasonably concise, and the author uses good judgment in determining which calculations to present as examples and which to reserve for practice, all of which make this a very easy text to read. My only reservations are that necessary assumptions and approximations do not always seem fully justified, and the reader is often asked to wait until later in the text for certain approximations to be justified, which at times disrupts the logical flow of the text. The text is also somewhat incomplete in the sense that Dodelson does not always start from first principles. In my case I considered this an advantage as it allowed for quicker reading and less overhead before important results are presented. The discussion of inflation was less complete than I had hoped, but sufficient to prepare me for the literature. |
the BEST book on cosmology for the advanced student
| Customer Rating: | Without question, Dodelson's book beats out a herd of books at the present redshift for the de rigeur text to be bandied about by grad students. I haven't looked back at Padmanabhan's Structure formation in awhile, but it was written before the COBE discoveries, and so it's a bit "old fashioned" now; there are a number of other books worth looking at, of course.
Couple Dodelson with Kolb & Turner's Early Universe text (which has some more in depth treatments of QCD- and high energy-related effects such as the axion), and perhaps with the old -- but still excellent -- Peebles book on large scale structure, and you're ready to hit the ground running in the literature.
Especially commendable aspects of Dodelson's book:
1. A great literature review at the end of each chapter allows you to dip deeper (or clarify things.) Dodelson should also be praised for his evenhandedness.
2. His in depth solutions -- meaning, you and he crunch the algebra together down the page -- are a great antidote to the "it can be shown" attitude of many cosmology papers (and sometimes textbooks!)
PS: this book got a really negative, arrogant review in I think it was Physics Today. The reviewer said we should all wait for Steven Weinberg to rewrite his Gravitation book. No thanks. Look, Dodelson's book is not as poetic as Misner Thorne and Wheeler, and it's not as pretentious as a host of others. It's a practical, pragmatic set of tools. I just want to reiterate that, since this book has been published, nearly every one of the grad students in our department carries it around. The proof is in the pudding: this is a tremendously useful book. |
Approachable Cosmology
| Customer Rating: | | This book is a must-have for the cosmos-curious. Well organized and indexed and excellently written, the author puts difficult information within reach of the student who aspires to understand one of the most complex disciplines. A superb accomplishment by a fine teacher and consummate scientist that should become the definitive text for all would-be cosmologists. |
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