Notes for Jan 23

Posted on 2013/01/16 by kiwinerd

Hi everyone,

Here are my notes on Big Bang Cosmology, Part 1 of 2. I suspect that you will enjoy learning this stuff a lot. :-)

You may also enjoy perusing at your leisure the following cosmology sources which I will list for your Essay 5. But you are under no obligation to read any of them.

Cheers,
Prof. P.

 

Sources for Essay 5

Web sites

  1. I hate to admit it, but the Wikipedia page on the Big Bang is actually really good. It’s rather too detailed for our purposes, but it gets the overall gist and the most important details right, and it doesn’t overemphasize speculative theories like “ekpyrosis”, “quantum cosmology”, “loop quantum gravity” and the like.
  2. NASA’s WMAP site is very good. This is a PDF of all their Cosmology explanations in one bundle. One fun activity you can do on their web site is to Build Your Own Universe (Flash tool).
  3. The American Institute of Physics’s Cosmology page gives a more historical emphasis than my lecture notes.
  4. Cambridge University in the UK has a cosmology web site.
  5. Doug Scott at UBC has some online information about the CMB.
  6. One other reasonably good web site about the big bang, which gets a lot of hat tips from other sites purporting to explain cosmology, is here. Except that I strongly recommend avoiding its descriptions of “Alternative” models: they are weirdly chosen, and not relevant to our course.

Magazine articles

  1. “Decoding the oldest Light in the Universe”; Sky & Telescope, May 2008; 18-23 pp., by Gary Hinshaw and Robert Naeye.

Cosmology books for laypeople (mostly from a list put together by WMAP)

  1. Steven Weinberg’s popular book “The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe” (1977) is brilliant. The only disadvantage is that it was written in the seventies and so the material is dated: there have been many important cosmological discoveries since then.
  2. “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking (1988)
  3. “The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos” by Robert P. Kirschner (2002)
  4. “Quarks, Leptons and the Big Bang” by Jonathan Allday
  5. “The Accelerating Universe : Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant, and the Beauty of the Cosmos” by Mario Livio
  6. “One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos” by Neil De Grasse Tyson, et al
  7. “The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins” by Alan H. Guth
  8. “Measuring the Universe: Our Historic Quest to Chart the Horizons of Space and Time” by Kitty Ferguson
  9. “Echo of the Big Bang” (discusses the WMAP Mission) by Michael D. Lemonick
  10. “Just Six Numbers : The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe” by (Sir) Martin J. Rees
  11. “How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space” by Janna Levin
  12. “The Five Ages of the Universe : Inside the Physics of Eternity” by Fred Adams, Greg Laughlin
  13. “Before the Beginning : Our Universe and Others” by (Sir) Martin J. Rees
  14. “In Search of the Edge of Time : Black Holes, White Holes, Wormholes” by John Gribbin
  15. “The Sky Is Not The Limit : Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist” by Neil De Grasse Tyson
  16. “The Little Book of the Big Bang : A Cosmic Primer” by Craig J. Hogan
  17. “Astrophysical Concepts” by Martin Harwit
  18. “The Very First Light : The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe” by John C. Mather, John Boslough
  19. “Afterglow of Creation : From the Fireball to the Discovery of Cosmic Ripples” by Marcus Chown
  20. “After the First Three Minutes : The Story of Our Universe” by T. Padmanabhan
  21. “The Whole Shebang : A State-Of-The-Universe(s) Report” by Timothy Ferris
  22. “Astronomy For Dummies” by Stephen Maran
  23. “The Origin of the Universe” by John D. Barrow
  24. “The Big Bang” by Joseph Silk
  25. “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy” by Kip S. Thorne
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