Customer Reviews

Cosmological Inflation and Large-Scale Structure

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For those readers looking for a serious textbook on cosmological inflation, this is it!But of course, they should beware that it is fully technical, and has nothing to do with Andrew Liddle's small book, "An Introduction to Modern Cosmology". This is the real stuff, written by two experts who were instrumental in the development of the "slow-roll inflation" paradigm, and summing up all the latest developments in modern cosmology.
Starting with a small introduction about the hot Big Bang, the authors go on to an in-depth treatment of inflation and its consequences. The simplest model is then exposed and developed into its extensions, such as the Lambda-CDM model, the currently accepted model of inflationary cosmology.
Needless to say, the book offers also a fairly detailed treatment of the CMB and its anisotropies, acoustic oscillations and perturbation theory, and the CMB power spectrum, which are the latest tools in cosmological research.
However, those who are looking for a complete treatment of CMB anisotropies will not find it here.They could turn, for instance, to many articles on arxiv, e.g.the one by Ruth Durrer (astro-ph/0109522)which develops this subject in more detail.
All in all, this book by Liddle and Lyth will probably serve as a textbook on cosmology for the coming ten years.

This book is atrocious. It has copious typos and very little explanatory text, and the text it does have is poorly written. I got to page 100 thinking it was still introducing a general, broad overview of concepts it would cover again later in greater detail (some of which it does), but it does not go into enough detail to be an introductory book to the field. I am certain Weinberg's Cosmology or Mukhanov's Physical Foundations of Cosmology is much better. I am going to return this one and get one of those.