Cosmology 101
1st Edition
Published on 30. March 2007
216 pages
978-0-313-07032-7 (ISBN)
Description
What should the average person know about science? Because science is so central to life in the 21st century, science educators and other leaders of the scientific community believe that it is essential that everyone understand the basic concepts of the most vital and far-reaching disciplines. Cosmology 101 does exactly that. This accessible volume provides readers - whether students new to the field or just interested members of the lay public - with the essential ideas of evolution using a minimum of jargon and mathematics. Concepts are introduced in a progressive order so that more complicated ideas build on simpler ones, and each is discussed in small, bite-sized segments so that they can be more easily understood.This volume in the Science 101 series provides readers with a solid understanding of how scientist know what they know about the universe.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Target group
College/higher education
ISBN-13
978-0-313-07032-7 (9780313070327)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Series Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction
- Where Did It All Come From?
- What Is Science?
- Science and Religion
- 1. Luminous Matters: Light and Stars
- Cosmology as a Unique Practice
- The Electromagnetic Spectrum
- Magnitudes
- Telescopes
- Spectroscopy
- The Classification of Stars
- The HR Diagram
- The Interstellar Medium
- The Lives of Stars
- Star Formation
- Stellar Evolution
- Cepheids and the Period-Luminosity Relationship
- Stellar Corpses
- 2. The History of Cosmology
- The Rise of the Geocentric Universe
- The Copernican Revolution
- Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion
- Galileo, Newton, and the Telescopic Revolution
- Why Is the Night Sky Dark?
- The Problem of the Nebulae
- The Great Debate
- The Development of Hubble's Law
- 3. Warped Space-time: General Relativity and Modern Cosmology
- General Relativity
- Cosmological Models
- The Big Bang and Steady-State Theories
- Lemâitre and the Primeval Atom
- Gamow's Evolutionary Model and the Steady-State
- The Rise of the Big Bang
- 4. Measuring and Mapping the Universe
- Normal Galaxies
- The Milky Way
- The Local Group
- Active Galactic Nuclei
- Dark Matter
- Large-Scale Structure
- The Cosmic Distance Ladder
- Standard Candles
- The Age of the Universe
- Measuring the Hubble Constant
- 5. The Evolution of the Universe
- The Standard Model of Particle Physics
- The Fundamental Forces and Particles
- Unifying the Forces
- The First Fifteen Minutes
- The Dark Age
- The Fate of the Universe
- Inflationary Cosmology
- Problems with the Big Bang
- Old Inflation
- New Inflation
- Eternal Inflation
- Dark Matter Redux
- Dark Energy
- The Accelerating Universe
- Candidates for Dark Energy
- The Concordance Model
- Acoustic Waves and the Early Universe
- Results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP)
- Other Observations
- 6. The Road Goes Ever On: Continuing Speculations
- Multiple Dimensions
- String Theory
- M-theory and Braneworlds
- Cosmic Strings
- The Fine-Tuned Universe
- The Anthropic Principle
- Multiverses
- The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
- Life as We Know It (LAWKI)
- Talking to Aliens
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
