cosmology the origin and evolution of cosmic structure, 2nd edition the origin and evolution of cosmic structure

[...]... only by the beginnings of mathematical physics but also by the first stirrings of technological development In the era of the Industrial Revolution, man’s perception of the natural world was framed in terms of heat engines and thermodynamics, and involved such concepts as the ‘Heat Death of the Universe’ With hindsight we can say that cosmology did not really come of age as a science until the 20th... showing evidence of evolution in the properties of these objects at this time, and the first calculations had already been made, notably by Alpher and Herman in the late 1940s, of the elemental abundances expected to be produced by nuclear reactions in the early stages of the Big Bang These, and other, considerations left the Big Bang model as the clear victor over the steady-state picture By the 1970s, attention... Another interesting characteristic of cosmology is the distinction, which is often blurred, between what one might call cosmology and metacosmology We take cosmology to mean the scientific study of the cosmos as a whole, an essential part of which is the testing of theoretical constructions against observations, as described above On the other hand, metacosmology is a term which describes elements of. .. often based on ideas of symmetry which reduce the number of degrees of freedom one has to consider This general rule proved to be the case in the early years of the 20th century when the first steps were taken, by Einstein and others, towards a scientific theory of the Universe Little was then known empirically about the distribution of matter in the Universe and Einstein’s theory of gravity was found... statistical properties of galaxy clustering, the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background, galaxy-peculiar motions and observations of galaxy evolution and the extragalactic radiation backgrounds The last part of the book is at a rather higher level than the preceding ones and is intended to be closer to the ongoing research in this field Some of the text is based upon an English adaptation of Introduzione... in 1992 of fluctuations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background, have made newspaper headlines all around the world Both observational and theoretical sides of the subject continue to engross not only the best undergraduate and postgraduate students and more senior professional scientists, but also the general public Part of the fascination is that cosmology lies at the crossroads of many... steady-state cosmology This theory implies, amongst other things, the continuous creation of matter to keep the density of the expanding Universe constant The steady-state universe was abandoned in the 1960s because of the properties of the cosmic microwave background, radio sources and the cosmological helium abundance which are more readily explained in a Big Bang model than in a steady state Nowadays the. .. ‘pancakes’ The debate xiv Preface to First Edition between the isothermal and adiabatic schools never reached the level of animosity of the Big Bang versus steady-state controversy but was nevertheless healthily animated By the 1980s it was realised that neither of these models could be correct The reasons for this conclusion are not important at this stage; we shall discuss them in detail during Part 3 of the. .. arisen and which does not require the introduction of the Cosmological Principle ab initio While creating an observable patch of the Universe which is predominantly smooth and isotropic, inflation also guarantees the existence of small fluctuations in the cosmological density which may be the initial perturbations needed to feed the gravitational instability thought to be the origin of galaxies and other structures... researchers On the other hand, many Soviet astrophysicists of the time, led by Yakov B Zel’dovich, favoured a model, the adiabatic model, in which the first structures to condense out of the expanding plasma were huge agglomerations of mass on the scale of giant superclusters of galaxies; smaller structures like individual galaxies were assumed to be formed by fragmentation processes within the larger structures, . Italy Cosmology The Origin and Evolution of Cosmic Structure Cosmology The Origin and Evolution of Cosmic Structure Second Edition Peter Coles School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Nottingham,. in the cosmological density which may be the initial per- turbations needed to feed the gravitational instability thought to be the origin of galaxies and other structures. The history of cosmology. strong research interest in theories for the origin and evolution of cosmic structure – galaxies, clusters and the like – and, in many respects, this is indeed the central problem in this field, we