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"Archeology is the science that probes the past few thousand years. Geology takes us back two or even three billion years. Beyond that is the realm of cosmology: the study of the beginnings of the Universe around us."
So begins a journey deep into the origins of time, the birth of galaxies, and all the way to the farthest realm, beyond the end of it all. The tour starts at the beginning, the very early Universe - with Silk's masterful account of the Big Bang Theory, culminating in the 1965 discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. "This whisper of creation is the greatly faded relic of the primordial fireball..."
A respected and creative scientist, Silk writes about cosmology, astronomy and astrophysics with an accessible combination of "clarity, poise, even wit," as The New York Times said of his earlier book for general readers, The Left Hand of Creation (written with John D. Barrow).
This volume in the celebrated Masters of Modern Physics series probes the enigma of the great cosmic voids, "missing mass" in the Universe, a puzzle that continues to baffle scientists as one of the principal unsolved dark mysteries.
"The cosmic connection," Silk concludes, "defines our place in the Universe, in more ways than one. The uniformity of the radiation in the sky, to better than a thousandth of a percent, tells us that our location can be nowhere special. We are neither at the center nor at the edge of the Universe, but at a perfectly random location in a perfectly isotropic Universe."
| About the Series | |
| Preface | |
| Cosmologists and Their Myths | p. 3 |
| Anthropic Musings | p. 8 |
| The Big-Bang Theory | p. 12 |
| The Very Early Universe | p. 22 |
| Formation of the Galaxies | p. 43 |
| Slow-motion Galactic Birth | p. 51 |
| A Deep Look at Forming Galaxies | p. 54 |
| In Search of Young Galaxies | p. 57 |
| The First Stars | p. 60 |
| Did the Tail Wag the Cosmic Dog? | p. 68 |
| Primordial Helium Abundance and Big-Bang Cosmology | p. 72 |
| Historic Fluctuations | p. 78 |
| The Origin of Galaxies | p. 84 |
| Moving As One | p. 99 |
| Deciphering the Cosmic Code | p. 103 |
| Our Local Pancake | p. 108 |
| Texture and Cosmic Structure | p. 115 |
| A Quasar Superstructure | p. 120 |
| Texture and the Microwave Background | p. 123 |
| Is Omega Equal to Unity? | p. 126 |
| A Bubbly Universe | p. 129 |
| The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe | p. 133 |
| The Dark Cloud | p. 149 |
| The Dark Cloud Revisited | p. 153 |
| The Invisible Universe | p. 157 |
| From Quark to Cosmos | p. 163 |
| The Missing Mass - Now It's a Gravitino! | p. 169 |
| Great Voids in the Universe | p. 173 |
| The Intergalactic Medium | p. 177 |
| Dark Matter Comes in from the Cold | p. 180 |
| Cosmology Back to the Beginning | p. 185 |
| Probing the Primeval Fireball | p. 190 |
| An Infrared View of the Universe | p. 197 |
| Dark Matter Detected? | p. 202 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 209 |
| Index | p. 210 |
| About the Author | p. 214 |
| Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9781563960611
ISBN-10: 1563960613
Series: Masters of Modern Physics
Audience:
General
Format:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 214
Published: 8th May 1997
Publisher: American Institute of Physics
Country of Publication: US
Dimensions (cm): 23.5 x 15.5
x 1.88
Weight (kg): 1.11
