| Lecture Notes |
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| Lecture 1 - Introduction to Cosmology - powers of 10, exponents, units of time and distance |
| Lecture 2 - Beginning Cosmology - light travel time, the lookback "onion", lookback horizon, Olber's paradox |
| Lecture 3 - What the Universe is Made Of - EM radiation, spectra, photons vs. waves, atoms, antimatter, dark matter |
| Lecture 4 - The life-cycles of stars - how stars shine, the HR diagram, supernovae, nucleosynthesis, dwarf stars, how stars are born, interstaller gas and dust |
| Lecture 5 - Measuring the Milky Way - the distance ladder, cepheid variables, size and shape of the Milky Way, disk stars vs. halo stars, ages of the oldest stars |
| Lecture 6 - Weighing the Milky Way - the Doppler effect, rotation curves, evidence for dark matter, universal ratio of dark matter to luminous matter |
| Lecture 7 - The Cosmic Tapestry of Galaxies - cosmic landscape, Hubble types, clusters of galaxies, galaxy collisions |
| Lecture 8 - The Expanding Universe - discovery by Hubble, Doppler effect, cosmological redshift, Hubble Law, age of the Universe, ages of the oldest stars, resolution of Olber's paradox |
| Lecture 9 - Active Galactic Nuclei and QSOs - what is a quasar?, centers of galaxies, jets and lobes, black hole engines and accretion disks, QSOs triggered by mergers, evidence for nearby BHs |
| Lecture 10 - Black Holes - what is a black hole? Schwarzschild radius, falling into a BH, BH evaporation, BH model for AGNs, dormant BHs in nearby galaxies |
| Lecture 11/12 - Energy, Heat, and Light, and the Cosmic Fireball - energy and light, thermal (blackbody) radiation, ionized plasmas, discovery of the CMB, temperature of a blackbody, matter and radiation vs. time, recombination era, opaque redshift wall |
| Lecture 13 - General Relativity and Geometry of the Universe - GR vs. Newton, curved space, gravity decelerates the Universe, critical density, Omega, flat Universe, Lambda |
| Lecture 14 - An Accelerating Universe - CMB says Universe is flat, too little matter for critical density, supernovae say non-zero Lambda, physics implications of Lambda, the ultimate fate of the Universe |
| Lecture 15 - The Forces and Particle Zoo - The four forces of Nature, particle families, the Standard Model, Supersymmetry and dark matter |
| Lecture 16 - Quantum Mechanics - the Uncertainty Principle, virtual particles, pair production, active vacuum, quantum "noise" |
| Lecture 17 - The Unification of Forces - where force comes from, forces vary with distance, concepts in unification, the Grand Unified Theory (GUT), GUTs at high temperature |
| Lecture 18 - GUTs and the Inflationary Universe - what is inflation?, isotropy/flatness problems, GUT trigger of inflation, the Universe just after inflation ended |
| Lecture 19 - Freezeouts and Milestones - pair production and annihilation, what is a "freezeout?", primordial nucleosynthesis, problem of baryogenesis |
| Lecture 20/21 - The Origin of Structure and Galaxies - examples of structure, gravitational instability picture, hierarchical clustering, quantum density fluctuations, galaxy collisions, the Hubble sequence, separation of dark matter and oridinary matter |
| Lecture 22 - The Planck Time - when QM and GR collide, eternal inflation, "before" the Planck time, higher dimensions, string theory, many universes? |
| Lecture 23 - Anthropic Cosmology - amazing coincidences, strong and weak anthropic principles, infinite universes? |
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