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Physical Foundations of Cosmology
Inflationary cosmology has been developed over the last twenty years to remedy serious shortcomings in the standard hot big bang model of the universe. Taking an original approach, this textbook explains the basis of modern cosmology and shows where the theoretical results come from. The book is divided into two parts; the first deals with the homogeneous and isotropic model of the Universe, the second part discusses how inhomogeneities can explain its structure. Established material such as the inflation and quantum cosmological perturbation are presented in great detail.
421 pages, Hardcover
First published November 10, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 24, 2022
Plato's image of the Cave, surely the most famous metaphor in all of philosophy, is famous precisely because it can be applied to everything: but somewhere towards the end of this book, it struck me that it can be applied with unusual directness and literalness to modern cosmology. People had suspected since the 1920s that the universe probably started in a very hot, very dense state (telescopes showed that all the galaxies were moving apart; the obvious explanation was that they were once much closer together). In the 1960s, these suspicions were transformed into near-certainty, when the Cosmic Background Radiation was discovered: it could only be the light from the beginning of the universe. But just what happened during the first few moments still remained unclear. As people have found better ways to study the Cosmic Background Radiation, these questions have become better and better understood. Mukhanov's book gives a detailed mathematical picture of what was known around 2005.
When people first detected the CBR, they thought it was completely uniform, but within a few decades techniques were developed for mapping the tiny variations in temperature, measured in thousandths of one percent. People had already figured out that what we're seeing isn't the light from the very beginning of time. The problem is that the universe was for several hundred thousand years so hot that it consisted of plasma, with the electrons and nuclei dissociated from each other. Plasma is opaque to light, we can't see through it. The light we see comes from what is known as the Last Scattering Surface, the boundary where things had cooled down enough that electrons and nuclei combined into atoms and space became transparent. The patterns detected in the CMB are patterns on that surface. Amazingly, it turns out that we are looking at literal shadows on a literal wall which surrounds us in all directions, and trying to deduce from the shape of those shadows what has literally created the universe.
It's such a majestic thought that you just want to gape in awe: but physicists, we find, have long since passed the stage of gaping and are now busily engaged in precise calculations. This book presents four hundred pages of details. I was not able to follow most of them - I would say that good graduate level physics is needed - but there is a lot of text between the largely incomprehensible equations, and the experience is rather like wandering around a huge museum with a competent guide. Here, the guide says, is the method you use to determine the temperature and the shape of space when the universe was a certain age. Here are the reactions which should explain why there is matter rather than just radiation. (It is truly extraordinary that the classic philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing seems to reduce to questions of asymmetry in certain reactions). Here are models of what the universe was like when the energy scale was trillions of times greater than the highest level we can reach in our miserable particle accelerators, and it went through a phase of exponential expansion. I had always found "inflation" rather hard to believe in, but after walking around Professor Mukhanov's virtual exhibit I am less sceptical. Step by step, he explains just what kind of shadows it would produce on the great wall we're looking at, and why it's so extremely difficult to think of other ways in which just those shadows could have arisen.
Moving to another celebrated classical text, I don't want to knock Genesis 1. The first few verses of the KJV contain some of my all-time favourite lines of poetry. But dammit, this is even better.
When people first detected the CBR, they thought it was completely uniform, but within a few decades techniques were developed for mapping the tiny variations in temperature, measured in thousandths of one percent. People had already figured out that what we're seeing isn't the light from the very beginning of time. The problem is that the universe was for several hundred thousand years so hot that it consisted of plasma, with the electrons and nuclei dissociated from each other. Plasma is opaque to light, we can't see through it. The light we see comes from what is known as the Last Scattering Surface, the boundary where things had cooled down enough that electrons and nuclei combined into atoms and space became transparent. The patterns detected in the CMB are patterns on that surface. Amazingly, it turns out that we are looking at literal shadows on a literal wall which surrounds us in all directions, and trying to deduce from the shape of those shadows what has literally created the universe.
It's such a majestic thought that you just want to gape in awe: but physicists, we find, have long since passed the stage of gaping and are now busily engaged in precise calculations. This book presents four hundred pages of details. I was not able to follow most of them - I would say that good graduate level physics is needed - but there is a lot of text between the largely incomprehensible equations, and the experience is rather like wandering around a huge museum with a competent guide. Here, the guide says, is the method you use to determine the temperature and the shape of space when the universe was a certain age. Here are the reactions which should explain why there is matter rather than just radiation. (It is truly extraordinary that the classic philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing seems to reduce to questions of asymmetry in certain reactions). Here are models of what the universe was like when the energy scale was trillions of times greater than the highest level we can reach in our miserable particle accelerators, and it went through a phase of exponential expansion. I had always found "inflation" rather hard to believe in, but after walking around Professor Mukhanov's virtual exhibit I am less sceptical. Step by step, he explains just what kind of shadows it would produce on the great wall we're looking at, and why it's so extremely difficult to think of other ways in which just those shadows could have arisen.
Moving to another celebrated classical text, I don't want to knock Genesis 1. The first few verses of the KJV contain some of my all-time favourite lines of poetry. But dammit, this is even better.
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July 25, 2022Good
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews