Here’s a blast from the somewhat-recent past: a set of five lectures I gave at CERN in 2005. It looks like the quality of the recording is pretty good. The first lecture was an overview at a colloquium level; i.e. meant for physicists, but not necessarily with any knowledge of cosmology. The next four are blackboard talks with a greater focus; they try to bring people up to speed on the basic tools you need to think about modern early-universe cosmology.
Obviously I’m not going to watch all five hours of these, so I’ll just have to hope that I’m relatively coherent throughout. (I do remember being a bit jet-lagged.) But I do notice that, while it was only a few years ago, I do appear relatively young and enthusiastic. Ah, the ravages of Time…
Lecture One: Introduction to Cosmology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUNtO2r_-eo
Lecture Two: Dark Matter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq-lGX2PRrc
Lecture Three: Dark Energy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYVj2RhXxeU
Lecture Four: Thermodynamics and the Early Universe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=178mMnGvWs0
Lecture Five: Inflation and Beyond
Thanks Sean. I watched the first lecture and it was very informative for me since it harkened back to an astrophysics class I took in my fourth year of university.
Hi Sean, great lectures as ever.
Can I ask a question about global topology?
We describe an FRW universe with positive spatial curvature as “closed”, as it has the metric of a three-sphere, but I want to know what this actually means. We derive the three-sphere metric by changing coordinates from r to χ, where χ = Sin(r). Is χ not limited to the interval [0,π/2), since beyond that we are simply reproducing the same r? In which case, is the universe not really one “hemi-threesphere” and not closed in the same way as a full sphere is?
You state in your book that the “only possible global structure is the complete three-sphere”, but you don’t go into why.
The book, btw, is excellent (I particularly enjoy the time you spent at the beginning going into diff. geometry etc, although I still don’t quite get the link, other than notational, between differential forms and integral measures, such that we can integrate p-forms as if they were ordinary integrals).
Sean ,what do you think of this paper on Dirac-Milne universe?
http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.3054
@Jensen (20) – Sean recorded a series of lectures called Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe for the Teaching Company (which is actually how I first learned about him). As the title suggests, the focus is certainly around the dark stuff, but the lectures also cover a lot of the general cosmology topics that he’s referencing and explaining in these CERN videos. I have zero formal training in physics, astrophysics, or cosmology (just a healthy interest and some math background), and was able to follow along quite easily with maybe a little bit of rewinding necessary. The lectures are aimed at a popular audience, so not as many specific ‘industry’ references or examples that were in the CERN lectures, and may be something to look into given your comments…
Cheers,
HK
Suppose we do the naive integral for the vacuum energy, but pick a k_max such that I get the 1e-3 eV, what is the value of that k_max?
@27: No, it is not limited to this interval. In fact, one can sometimes travel around such a universe and return to one’s starting position (but only if a) it doesn’t recollapse first and b) it doesn’t expand too quickly). As the old joke goes, if you look hard enough, you can see the back of your head. If you look even harder, you can see Uranus.