Customer Reviews

Modern Cosmology

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I stumbled across the title of this book when I was browsing around somebody's cosmology course website. I know that Scott Dodelson is a quite well-known cosmologist, so I start searching for more information. After reading the preliminary detailed table of contents (I found it somewhere on the web) and the book description from Academic Press, I decided to pre-order the book. The book arrived just on March 31. I tried to take a quick but thorough view before write this comment. I haven't read the book in full. Here i would just like to write the Table of Contents in more detail by including the sections.

1. The Standard Model and Beyond. The expanding universe, Hubble diagram, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), beyond Standard Model.

2. The Smooth, Expanding Universe. General relativity (crash course), distances, evolution of energy, cosmic inventory (photons, baryons, matter, neutrinos, dark energy, epoch of matter-radiation equality).

3. Beyond Equilibrium. Boltzmann equation for annihilation, BBN (neutron & light elements abudance), recombination, dark matter.

4. The Boltzmann Equations (BE). BE for harmonic oscillator, the collisionless BE for photons (0th and 1st order), collision terms: Compton scattering, BE for photons, BE for Cold Dark Matter (CDM), BE for baryons.

5. Einstein Equations. Perturbed Ricci tensor and scalar, two components of Einstein Equations, tensor perturbations, decomposition theorems, gauges.

6. Initial conditions. Einstein-Boltzmann equations at early times, the horizon, inflation, gravity wave production, scalar perturbations.

7. Inhomogeneities. Prelude, large scales (super-horizon & through horizon crossing), small scales (horizon & sub-horizon crossing), growth function, beyond CDM.

8. Anisotropies. Overview, large-scale anisotropies, acoustic oscillations (tightly coupled), diffusion (Silk) damping, inhomogeneities to anisotropies (free streaming, C_{l}s), anisotropy spectrum (Sachs-Wolfe, small scales), cosmological parameters.

9. Probe of Inhomogeneities. Angular correlation, peculiar velocities, redshift space distortions, galaxy clusters.

10. Weak Lensing and Polarization. Gravitational distortion, geodesics and shears, ellipticity, weak lensing power spectrum, polarization, quadrupole and Q/U (or E/B as in recent literatures) decomposition, polarization power spectra, detection of gravity waves.

11. Analysis. Likelihood function, signal covariance matrix, Karhunen-Loeve & optimal quadratic, Fisher matrix, mapmaking & inversion, systematics, foregrounds.

Appendix A. Solution to Selected Problems
Appendix B. Numbers
Appendix C. Special Functions
Appendix D. Symbols.
Bibliography.

In addition, each chapter is ended with a summary and further reading list. Quite nice indeed. The bibliography are extensive: there are classic, pioneering papers, recent papers, textbooks. There are some color plates in the middle part of the book.

In my opinion, this book is far better than Peacock in discussing new aspect of anisotropies and inhomogeneities. Lots of topics that were only previously available in research papers, review articles, summer school lectures, preprints, are brought together to the form of a decent book. The chapter of analysis is quite interesting, since the subject has become very demanding but there are still no single treatment of it.

Dodelson said in the preface that the expected audience are advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. Some of the necessary materials (GR, inflation, are introduced in the text).

I myself suggests, however, that the reader should have a proficient knowledge in standard undergraduate physics (mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, quantum physics), mathematical physics, and general relativity if possible. Some knowledge of astrophysics/astronomy, statistics/data analysis, kinetic theory, would certainly be welcomed.

A little bit of cons, however are inevitable. The current development in cosmology is astounding. Just a few weeks before the book was published, the WMAP team released their first result after a year of observations, which put tight constraints for cosmological models. Several numbers and figures in the book then are in the need to be updated. Topics such as distant quasars, cosmic reionization and the end of cosmic dark ages, first-generation stars, might be worthy enough to be included in the future.

This book is definitely a must buy for cosmologist.

Update 2003 July 8
Author's website for the book is available with full table of contents at

home.fnal.gov/~dodelson/book.html

Update 2003 September 8.
You should also get two more books beside this.

1) Kinetic theory in the expanding universe by Jeremy Bernstein, Cambridge, 1988, ISBN 0-521-36050-1. Best reference material to understand relativistic Boltzmann equation in Dodelson chapter 3-5.

2) The Early Universe by Edward W. Kolb and Michael S. Turner, Perseus/Westview, 1994, ISBN 0-201-62674-8. Contains extensive material on FRW metric, detailed discussion on nucleosynthesis and particle physics-cosmology interface, inflation, and structure formation.

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.

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.

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.

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.