A Must have For Every Theoretical Physicist
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Wow! This is the first review of the book in the whole of internet. I got a copy of Steven Weinberg's Cosmology today though Amazon and am happy! Reminds me of the day back in early 2000 when I pre-ordered Weinberg's Supersymmetry and the day I got it was full of intellectual thrills. All the other texts had a very superficial treatment of Supersymmetry and this was also the case with Cosmology - until now, when the biggest physicist in the post-world-war-2 era wrote on the subject!
Any review of Weinberg's texts is far from complete without having to say something about the Preface. The reader will remember the preface of his book on Gravitation and Cosmology where Weinberg tells us how dissatisfied he was with the usual approach to studying Gravitation and how he sees General Relativity as a consequence of constraints imposed by the quantum theory of massless Spin-2 particles. The reason for Weinberg to write the texts on Quantum Field Theory was also spelled out in the preface - he wanted to address a deep question: "Why Quantum Fields?". In the preface of this book, the author tells us that he wanted to share his experience of learning the latest development of Cosmology, since lots has happened in this area recently. Plus of course, he indirectly (and correctly!) points out how incomplete the usual review articles on Cosmology are.
That indeed is true! And this book precisely will help the reader in learning Cosmology in a way where equations are actually derived and not just mentioned with a reference. Usual treatment of cosmology is vague and superficial and in this text the reader will find not only the full derivation but also good explanations.
The book can be divided in 2 parts. In Chapters 1-4 the reader is introduced to topics ranging from the Robertson-Walker metric to the expanding universe to inflation. The reader has to be familiar with General Relativity to start reading this book. There is a small Appendix in the book on GR: however it should be seen as a write-up for establishing conventions. The remainder of the book (Chapters 5-10) consider advanced topics such as anisotropies, growth of structure and multi-field inflation. Weinberg mentions that he did not want to cover speculative topics and this seems to make sense for such a book. (Though I would have loved a section on the Cosmic Anthropic Principle)
To summarize, this is simply the best reference for Cosmology and Weinberg has once again written a text, noboby else could have.
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