8.286 | Fall 2013 | Undergraduate

The Early Universe

Readings

Required Textbooks

Ryden, Barbara. Introduction to Cosmology. Addison-Wesley, 2002. ISBN: 9780805389128.

Weinberg, Steven. The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. 2nd updated ed. Basic Books, 1993. ISBN: 9780465024377. 

Liddle, Andrew. An Introduction to Modern Cosmology. 2nd ed. Wiley, 2003. ISBN: 9780470848357. [Preview with Google Books]

Guth, Alan H. The Inflationary Universe. Basic Books, 1998. ISBN: 9780201328400.

More Advanced Readings

There are some excellent graduate-level textbooks on cosmology that some of you might want to look at. These books are well beyond the level of this course, but I mention them in case any of you become interested in pursuing some topic at a more advanced level. The first two are written from the astrophysical point of view, while the last five describe the early universe more from the particle physicists’ slant:

Peacock, John A. Cosmological Physics. Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780521422703. [Preview with Google Books]

Peebles, P. J. E. Principles of Physical Cosmology. Princeton University Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780691019338. [Preview with Google Books]

Weinberg, Steven. Cosmology. Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780198526827.

Dodelson, Scott. Modern Cosmology. Academic Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780122191411. [Preview with Google Books]

Mukhanov, Viatcheslav. Physical Foundations of Cosmology. Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780521563987. [Preview with Google Books]

Kolb, Edward W., and Michael S. Turner. The Early Universe. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1990. ISBN: 9780201116038.

Linde, Andrei. Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology (Contemporary Concepts in Physics). CRC Press, 1990. ISBN: 9783718604906. [Preview with Google Books]

Course Info

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Fall 2013
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