Related papers: Cosmology for high school
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
In this essay a critical review of present conceptual problems in current cosmology is provided from a more philosophical point of view. In essence, a digression on how could philosophy help cosmologists in what is strictly their…
This essay is a nontechnical primer for a broader audience, in which I paint a broad-brush picture of modern cosmology. I begin by reviewing the evidence for the big bang, including the expansion of our Universe, the cosmic microwave…
We present an elementary account of mathematical cosmology through a series of important unsolved problems. We introduce the fundamental notion of `a cosmology' and focus on the issue of singularities as a theme unifying many current,…
Continuing professional development for teachers in the physical sciences is crucial to maintaining high-quality instruction, especially when addressing modern physics. Nevertheless, the teaching of these topics often relies on theoretical…
An overview is provided of the singularity theorems in cosmological contexts at a level suitable for advanced graduate students. The necessary background from tensor and causal geometry to understand the theorems is supplied, the…
In recent years, by theory and observation cosmology has advanced substantially. Parameters of the concordance or $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model are given with unprecedented precision ("precision cosmology"). On the other side, 95% of the…
For most of its history, cosmology was a qualitatively constrained discourse on the universe, shaped by limited observational access and the absence of global dynamical laws. This situation has changed decisively in recent decades. Modern…
Two fundamental laws are needed for prediction in the universe: (1) a basic dynamical law and (2) a law for the cosmological initial condition. Quantum cosmology is the area of basic research concerned with the search for a theory of the…
After a survey of the present state of cosmological theory and observations, this article discusses a series of major themes underlying the relation of philosophy to cosmology. These are: A: The uniqueness of the universe; B: The large…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
Modern cosmology has created a tight link between particle physics / field theory and a wealth of new observational data on the structure of the Universe. These lecture notes focus on some of the most important aspects concerning the…
In this paper we give a pedagogical review of the recent observational results in cosmology from the study of type Ia supernovae and anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. By providing consistent constrainst on the cosmological…
The state of our understanding of cosmology is reviewed from an astrophysical cosmologist point of view with a particular emphasis given to recent observations and their impact. Discussion is then presented on the implications for particle…
To our best knowledge, there are no problem books on cosmology yet, that would include its spectacular recent achievements. We believe there is a strong need for such now, when cosmology is swiftly becoming a strict and vast science, and…
An introduction to modern cosmology is given, focusing on theories for the origin of structure in the Universe. After a brief review of the theory of growth of cosmological perturbations and a summary of some important observational…
Time has always played a crucial role in cosmology. I review some of the aspects of the present cosmological model which are more directly related to time, such as: the definition of a cosmic time; the existence of typical timescales and…
This is a written version of a series of lectures aimed at undergraduate students in astrophysics/particle theory/particle experiment. We summarize the important progress made in recent years towards understanding high energy astrophysical…
I examine some recent findings in cosmology and their potential implications for the emergence of life in the universe. In particular, I discuss the requirements for carbon-based life, anthropic considerations with respect to the nature of…