I recently read a review of Weinberg’s wonderful new book, Cosmology, a 2009 sequel of sorts to his 1972 classic, Gravitation and Cosmology. The reviewer mentioned two other books, that of Mukhanov and that of Dodelson, as books worth having. Mukhanov’s Physical Foundations of Cosmology was already on my bookshelf (and, like the reviewer, I also consider it worth having) but not Dodelson’s book… so I decided to buy it.
I was not disappointed: it is an excellent cosmology book. In particular, it offers a very thorough introduction to the quantitative aspects of physical cosmology.
However… although the book was published only six years ago, it feels surprisingly dated. Through no fault of the author, to be clear: it’s just that cosmology has made tremendous progress in a few short years. I can think of two things in particular: results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), first released in 2005, providing precision maps of the cosmic microwave background, allowing accurate detection of the so-called acoustic peaks; and ever improving large scale galaxy surveys, notably the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), providing spectra for many hundreds of thousands of galaxies, yielding 3D density maps of the deep cosmos that can be used to test models of structure formation.
The results speak for themselves. For instance, Dodelson’s book gives 12.6 ± 1.1 billion years as the age of the Universe… in contrast, the latest WMAP result is 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years, a tenfold improvement in the accuracy of the estimate. I guess it’s not an enviable task to write a book for a field that is changing as rapidly as Modern Cosmology… which also happens to be the title of Dodelson’s book.