Review of The Little Book of Cosmology by Lyman Page

Phillip Helbig


The Observatory, 140, 1279, 281–282 (December 2020)


This is a book review of The Little Book of Cosmology by Lyman Page. As the caption of an image of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as seen by the WMAP satellite states, "The goal of this book is to explain this image and what it tells us about the universe." The level is typical for a popular-science book, and four short appendices provide a bit more detail which will be useful for some readers without cluttering the main text. Although the focus is on the CMB, the scope is broad. The book is well written; in particular, I found the descriptions of dark matter and structure formation and the final chapter — both the brief survey of some current topics and the summary of the book — better than those in similar books. The CMB has provided some of iconic scientific images: the essentially perfect black-body spectrum with error bars smaller than the width of the curve, the power spectrum of fluctuations, and the map of the same; they are all here.


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