Are Basics of Cosmology Difficult to Grasp?

[kent davidge]

Is Cosmology in a basic level more difficult to understand than the other areas of General Relativity?

By "basic level" I mean, in the way the subjects are presented for example, in Weinberg's textbook: Gravitation and Cosmology, Principals and Applications of General Relativity .

 

[jedishrfu]

This is really hard to say. Each author gears their book to graduate or undergrad level and also assumes the student understands some level of math important to the topic of the book.

I remember studying Wheeler's Gravitation book and being amazed as the large and detail in the book. I had studied Tensor Analysis prior to my independent study of the book but discovered that he went even farther into differential forms and I just got lost having never seen these constructs before.

 

[bland]

What concepts do you refer to, because I find the explanations given to the lay person by good cosmologists are easy to grasp, easier than general relativity.

 

[vanhees71]

I think the very fundamentals, i.e., the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker metric is among the most easy to grasp applications of GR. If it comes to the interesting modern details about the deviations from FLRW, i.e., the meaning of the power spectrum of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background or structure formation it gets quite complicated.

 

[jedishrfu]

For the layman, there's a book by Sten OdenWald called simply Cosmolgy

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1789505518/?tag=pfamazon01-20

which claims to be cover all major topics of cosmology saying:

Everything you need to know to master the subject - in one book.

Its part of the Degree in a Book brand, following along the lines of the Dummies and Idiot's Guide books.

However, Sten Odenwald is the real deal. He's an astronomer, author and NASA scientist/educator:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sten_Odenwald

so maybe there is a degree or radian in there.

 

[jedishrfu]

A couple of other books of interest:

1) OpenStax.org Astronomy book, a textbook for high school or college on all things Astronomy

https://openstax.org/details/books/astronomy

2) The Science of Interstellar with computer visuals of how black holes work. It has some cool orbitals of light circling the BH and then exiting.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393351378/?tag=pfamazon01-20

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Interstellar