Cosmology Lectures

[Vira Bhakta]

Thisis a course on cosmology, aimed at final year undergraduate students. It assumes a background in neither general relativity nor statistical mechanics. The full lecture notes come in around 170 pages. Please do email me if you find any typos or mistakes.

This course of the Theoretical Minimum series will concentrate on cosmology, the science of the origin and development of the universe. Along the way, students will take a close look at the Big Bang, the geometry of space-time, inflationary cosmology, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, dark energy, the anthropic principle, and the string theory landscape. (Image credit: ESO/MPE/Marc Schartmann)

Thanks, these will hopefully be really great. I love video lectures because I can pause and rewind whenever I (inevitably) get distracted, want to spend a few moments thinking about a certain point, or work something out. I notice I take about 50% extra time watching a lecture vs attending a class.

Sean,

Wonderful lex ! I am taking a course in the early universe & these are an immense help. Best of all is that the vids forego factors O(1), concentrating on concepts, but the TASI lex fill in those details. Primo.

Those who would like to learn more about how the universe began and developed can do so by taking this online Cosmology Class offered by Utah State University. This series of video lectures covers a variety of topics related to the creation and growth of the universe, including the basics of astronomy, electromagnetism, gravity, universe expansion theories, quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, thermal energy, black holes, dark matter, etc. Through this class, viewers can gain a greater understanding of physics, astronomy, and the universe.

Course Description: "Cook's Tour" of the universe. Ancient world models. Evidence for universal expansion; the size and age of the universe and how it all began. The long-range future and how to decide the right model. Anthropic principle.

Required attribution: Bullock, James. Physics 20B (UCI Open: University of California, Irvine), ../courses/physics_20b_cosmology.html. [Access date]. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

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Dr. Grant Tremblay is an Astrophysicist and the Project Scientist for the Chandra High Resolution Camera at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. He is Vice President of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), Vice Chair of the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee, and Chair Emeritus of NASA's Physics of the Cosmos Executive Committee. Previously, he was a NASA Einstein Fellow at Yale University, a Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) near Munich, and an Astronomer at ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. He is an author of more than 100 publications in astronomical journals and three books for the general public, including Remain in Light: The Once & Future Great Observatories, coming next year from Princeton Press. He frequently appears on Science and Discovery Channel documentary series including How the Universe Works, as well as in recent and forthcoming projects with the BBC and PBS NOVA.

Sera Markoff ( ) is a full professor of theoretical astrophysics/astroparticle physics at the University of Amsterdam, focused on the extreme physics around compact objects like black holes. She was educated in the US (BSc Physics @ MIT 1993, PhD Theoretical Astrophysics @University of Arizona 2000) before heading to Europe to work at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany as a Humboldt Research Fellow and then back to MIT as an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow, before joining the faculty in Amsterdam in 2006. She has won numerous awards for her research, including the top Dutch Research Council personal career grants VIDI and VICI, and was named Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014 for her work on black holes. She has also won awards for her community outreach projects. Within the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration she currently serves as vice-chair of the EHT Science Council and co-coordinates the Multi-Wavelength Science Working Group.

Dr. Katie Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist exploring a range of questions in cosmology, the study of the universe from beginning to end. She is currently an assistant professor of physics at North Carolina State University, where she is also a member of the Leadership in Public Science Cluster. She is the author of the book "The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)" and has written for a number of popular publications, such as Scientific American, Slate, Sky & Telescope, Time, and Cosmos magazine. She can be found on Twitter as @AstroKatie.

Recent evidence suggests that a massive body is lurking at the outskirts of our solar system, far beyond the orbits of the known giant planets. This object, at a distance approximately 20 times further than Neptune and with a mass approximately 5000 times larger that Pluto, is the real ninth planet of the solar system. I will talk about the observation that led us to the evidence for this Planet Nine and discuss how so massive an object could have been hiding in the outer solar system for so long. Finally I will discuss the international effort to pinpoint this newest member of our planetary family.

Mike Brown is a Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology where he teaches classes from introductory physics to the science of the solar system. He is a native of Huntsville, Alabama, where he grew up listening to the tests of the Saturn rockets preparing to go to the moon, and he received his undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley. He and his research group spend their time searching for and studying the most distant objects in the solar system and drinking coffee.

New Horizons is NASA's historic mission to explore the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt. The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons left Earth on 19 January 2006. It made the first exploration of the Pluto system--3 billion miles from Earth--summer 2015, culminating with a highly successful flyby inside the orbits of all five of Pluto's moons on July 14th. Dr. Stern will describe the history of the mission, the encounter with planet Pluto, and the major scientific discoveries made to date.

Dr. Alan Stern is a planetary scientist, space program executive, aerospace consultant, and author. He leads NASA's New Horizons mission to that successfully explored the Pluto system and is now exploring the Kuiper Belt-the farthest worlds ever explored by a space mission.

I survey how we humans have repeatedly underestimated not only the size of our cosmos, but also the power of our humans minds to understand it using mathematical equations. My examples include the recent claims of B-modes in the cosmic microwave background as smoking-gun evidence for quantum gravity, Hawking radiation, and cosmological inflation. I also highlight mysteries such as the nature of dark matter, dark energy and our early universe, and how creating the largest-ever 3D maps of our universe can shed new light on them.

Known as "Mad Max" for his unorthodox ideas and passion for adventure, his scientific interests range from precision cosmology to the ultimate nature of reality, all explored in his new popular book "Our Mathematical Universe". He is an MIT physics professor with more than two hundred technical papers and has featured in dozens of science documentaries. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine's "Breakthrough of the Year: 2003."

Galaxies are complex systems of stars, gas, and dark matter. These three major components interact in many different ways, leading galaxies to have the structure and motions we see today. I will discuss the current paradigm for galaxy formation, and show how some of the most beautiful Hubble Space Telescope observations can be used to extract detailed histories of the nearest galaxies, providing some of the most rigorous constraints on the physics that controls galaxy formation.

Julianne Dalcanton is a Professor of Astronomy, at the University of Washington, and researcher for Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Her main work is on the area of galaxy formation and evolution. She is currently leading the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury (ANGST) program on the Hubble Space Telescope.

The 1959 Nature article by Giuseppe Cocconi and Phil Morrison provided the theoretical underpinnings for SETI. Well over 100 search programs have been conducted since that time, including the long-running survey using the Ohio State University Radio Observatory. Most of these searches have been looking for photons at radio and optical wavelengths, but others have probed for exotic physics and astroengineering projects; none has yet been successful.

Critics have suggested that this means humans are alone in the cosmos. But that is far too strong a conclusion to draw from far too small an observational sampling. An appropriate analogy would be to retrieve one glass of water from the ocean, and having found no fish in that sample, to conclude that there were no fish in the ocean.

Instead of concluding that intelligent life on Earth is unique, it is more appropriate to note that in 50+ years our ability to search for electromagnetic signals has improved by at least 14 orders of magnitude and that these improvements are still occurring at an exponential rate. In addition, in the past 50+ years, the detection of exoplanets, and a growing appreciation of the robustness of extremophiles on our own planet have given the cosmos at least an appearance of being more biofriendly.

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