What Newton did (and what he didn't do) - my notes on the principles of cosmology

The past few posts on this blog got a little bit off topic (I think at least). For a blog that's meant to be focused on astrophysics, it didn't really have much physics in it. So this week I decided to shift gears a little bit.

Here is not a blog post but rather an introduction towards a 2 part set of notes. These notes cover fundamentals from the principles of cosmology: Newtonian equations, Friedmann equations and finding a constant for the rate of expansion of the universe. All these derivations eventually lead to a model for the expansion of the universe over time.

These notes are heavily inspired and guided by the lectures of one of my idols, Leonard Susskind, conducted at Stanford University in 2013-2014. Here is a link to these lectures on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-medYaqVak

So, go ahead. Explore my notes on the origin of the theory of the origin. I'll be exploring the fundamentals of cosmology further in my future posts, but for now, let me know if these notes were helpful in any way, or even if they're so incomprehensible and muddled that I might as well have not have posted. I hope not. Good luck!

Lecture 1 - Newtonian equations and Friedman’s formula.pdf

Download PDF • 6.68MB

Lecture 2 - modelling the expansion of the universe with matter and radiation.pdf

Download PDF • 5.38MB