Download or read book Principles of Physical Cosmology written by Phillip James Edwin Peebles and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1993-05-09 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first part of the work presents the elements of physical cosmology, including the history of the discovery of the expanding universe. The second part, on the cosmological tests that measure the geometry of spacetime, discusses general relativity theory as the basis for the tests, and then surveys the broad variety of ways the tests can be applied with the new generations of telescopes and detectors. The third part deals with the origin of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe, and reviews ideas about how the evolution of the universe might be traced back to very early epochs when structure originated. Each chapter begins with an introduction that can be understood with no special knowledge beyond undergraduate physics, and then progresses to more specialized topics.