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EDITORIAL INFORMATION

This book delivers a quantitative account of the science of cosmology, designed for a non-specialist audience. The basic principles are outlined using simple mathematics and physics, but still providing rigorous models of the universe. It offers an ideal introduction to the key ideas in cosmology, without going into technical details. The approach used is based on the fundamental ideas of general relativity, such as the spacetime interval, comoving coordinates, and spacetime curvature. It provides an up to date and thoughful discussion of the big bang and the crucial issues of structure and galaxy formation. Questions of method and philosophical approaches in cosmology are also briefly discussed. Advanced undergraduates in either physics or mathematics would benefit greatly from the book's use either as a course text or as a suplementary guide to cosmology courses.

(Extracted from the back cover).

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Contents.

-1- Discovering the Cosmos.

-1.1- The Universe as It Appears.
-1.2- The Distribution of Matter.
-1.3- Distances and Velocities in the Universe.

-2- The Relativistic Universe.

-2.1- The Theories of Relativity.
-2.2- Relativistic Cosmography.
-2.3- Causality and Horizons.

-3- The Dynamics of the Universe.

-3.1- The Metric of the Universe.
-3.2- The Matter Dominated Universe.
-3.3- Big Bang Models.

-4- The Primordial Universe.

-4.1- Towards the Big Bang.
-4.2- Events in the Primordial Universe.
-4.3- Primordial Nucleosynthesis.
-4.4- The Very Early Universe.

-5- Galaxy Formation.

-5.1- Gravitation and Fluctuations.
-5.2- The Growth of Fluctuations.

-6- Conclusion.

-Glossary.

OUR REVIEW

Books aimed at those average readers who are interested in the great themes of modern astrophysics are regrettably scarce at times. Not because their contents might be too complicated to explain, but rather because few science writers dare do so. Nevertheless, regarding this book, the author is extremely successful. The publishers, Cambridge University Press, being among the best producers of this kind of literature, have translated the French text Initiation â la Cosmologie, published by Masson Editeur in 1992, thus making it available to a wider readership - one that can only read in English.

In this little work the foundations of cosmology are developed in a very understandable way. We should not expect to find wide explanations nor great mathematical displays in it, but the basic facts which may attract our attention and our interest in getting to study the subject in some more depth if we so wish.