I want to talk about the first (and as of this post only) textbook on Dark Energy I have used. As of this post I have not gone through the book but I have read enough to get an idea of how it is. There is another Dark Energy book I recently discovered that I want to check out, but that will need to wait for another day. I am not getting paid to write this review, these are my own thoughts.
Dark Energy: Theory and Observations was published in 2010, and was written by Luca Amendola and Shinji Tsujikawa. A lot has happened in the realm of Dark Energy research since then, but the basics have stayed the same. This means that much of the book is still useful and you will learn some good tips and tricks throughout, even if some of the theories have been disproved (plus it is always fun and useful to play around with what ifs).
The first four chapters cover basic cosmology, including some statistics and perturbation theory. Much of this would be covered in a first semester cosmology course at the graduate level, and is covered in depth else where. But the coverage is nice and the authors do a good job of summarizing cosmology, along with the history of dark energy, in these first four chapters.
Chapter 5 goes into the observational evidence of dark energy, like supernovae and galaxy clusters. Then in chapter 6 you have the standard model for dark energy, the cosmological constant! To recap, the theory behind the cosmological constant is dark energy is constant throughout all of space (so for every cubic meter of space, dark energy is the same), and throughout time. So this means that in the beginning of our universe, when the universe was small, we have very little dark energy. As there is more and more universe (more and more cubic meters) there is more and more dark energy.
In chapters 7-11, many different types of theories, besides the cosmological constant, are discussed in varying detail. These are the chapters that will change in usefulness as our understanding of dark energy increases, because the theories contained in these chapters will probably be disproved as time goes on.
Chapters 12 and 13 are more statistics and perturbation. And then 14 and 15 talk about the future!
Then the authors kindly included ALL of the fully worked out solutions to the problems in chapter 16. And then you have appendices and the index.
What I Like So Far
- Good review in the early chapters.
- References all the papers so you can easily go into more depth.
- Provides problems and fully worked out solutions
What I Don’t Like
So far nothing!
