In the Dark

For those of you reading this blog who feel they need an up-to-date primer for the basics of modern cosmology without too much technical detail, I found a paper on the arXiv that might give you what you want. It’s over a hundred pages long but does not use much complicated mathematics but has some nice illustrations. The author is Markus Pössel; the abstract reads

An introduction to the physics and mathematics of the expanding universe, using no more than high-school level / undergraduate mathematics. Covered are the basics of scale factor expansion, the dynamics of the expanding universe, various distance concepts and the generalized redshift-luminosity relation, among other topics.

This paper focusses on the basics of the standard framework founded on general relativity, especially how cosmological distances are defined and measured, rather than on trendy modern topics like dark energy and the cosmic microwave background. I’d say any first-year physics student should be able to cope with it, but it’s not for someone who hasn’t learned calculus. On the other hand, it’s free to download so you don’t have much to lose by having a look!

You can download a PDF here.

This entry was posted on January 5, 2018 at 11:04 am and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags Cosmology, general relativity, Markus Pössel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.