Modern Cosmology

Over the last decade, cosmology has emerged as a mature science. Theories of the universe are now well-developed, and there is more data than ever before. Many of the old cosmology books are therefore obsolete. Perhaps the key change in our outlook can be summarized by saying that twenty years ago, theorists and observers agreed that the early universe was basically smooth, but they could not agree on how the clumps, such as galaxies, emerged from this smoothness. Today both sets of scienti...