Customer Reviews

Cosmology (Oxford Physics)

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Unlike the previous reviewer, I find this book is not good for a first approach of cosmology. (By the way, the early editions contain many errors - avoid them.) Graphs are not always well labelled or commented and also tend to be somewhat confusing. The style is not very inviting and derivations are often sped through. It would appear Rowan-Robinson is not a very good communicator of concepts - this is rather evident in the part dealing with open and closed models of the Universe (different spacetime metrics), where explanatory text is almost totally absent.

The part at the end (most recent edition) gives an interesting overview of current problems and recent theories, although it does not delve into exciting philosophical implications or ideas.

For more approachable presentations of Cosmology, especially for beginners, I would recommend books by John Gribbin. For more thorough exploration with more heavy maths included: Peter Coles or Eric Linder. For proper explorations of the philosophy dealing with and arising from Cosmology, look to Carl Sagan or Hubert Reeves.

When I was teaching high-school physics, a group of motivated students asked me to teach them some astronomy and cosmology. So I taught them the basics of astronomy from a Dutch book, and chose Rowan-Robinson's book as the textbook for the cosmology part. I chose it because of its modest size and lenght, its relatively recent publication date and its accessibility. Nevertheless, trying to teach 17-year-olds about relativity and such is an ambitious task, and I had my doubts whether or not the book was up to it. It was. Apart from having to make various derivations more explicit, the book proved to be self-contained and was highly useful. Therefore I strongly recommend it to anybody who's interested in modern cosmology, but has had no prior exposure to it. This is a great book to learn from!