Boulder Cosmology Group
Meets at 7PM on the first and third Thursdays of the
month in the Boulder Creek Room at the Main Boulder Public Library.
Exceptions will be noted below.
If the year is a link in the list below, clicking on that link will take you to the schedule for the year.
All books read or planned to be read by the group since its inception:
January 5, 2012 Two lectures from Satyan Devadoss’s DVD lecture series “The Shape of Nature”. These lectures, titled “The Topology of the Universe” and “The Geometry of the Universe”, will cover the qualitative and quantitative nature of the shape of the space that makes up our Universe.
January 19, 2012 – July 2012 We will start a new series of 24 DVD lectures, “Particle Physics for Non Physicists” by CU Professor Steven Pollock. These lectures should be accessible to anyone with a very modest science background. We will view and discuss the first two lectures, “The Nature of Physics” and “The Standard Model of Particle Physics”. For future meetings, there will also be optional supplemental reading, mostly from Robert Oerter’s book, The Theory of Almost Everything.
January 2011 – December 2011 View and discuss Mark Whittle’s course “Cosmology: The History and Nature of Our Universe”
September 15, 2011, September 29, 2011, and October 6, 2011 The Magic Furnace: The Search For The Origins Of Atoms Marcus Chown
Paul's printable Chronological Glossary for The Magic Furnace (23 pages). Alphabetical Glossary (16 pages).
April 2011 – May 5, 2011 Einstein’s Telescope Evalyn Gates
February 2010 – December 2010 Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein’s General Relativity James B. Hartle
June 2009 – January 2010 Gravity from the Ground Up Bernard Schutz
April 2009 – May 2009 Gravitation and Spacetime
Hans Ohanian and Remo Ruffini
Chapters 1 (“Newtonian Gravitation”) and 2 (“Special Relativity”)
January 2009 – March 2009 The Wraparound
Universe Jean-Pierre Luminet
October 2008 – December
2008 Cosmic Jackpot:
Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life Paul Davies
(the
paperback edition of this book is called The Goldilocks Enigma)
July 2008 – September 2008 Endless Universe:
Beyond the Big Bang Steinhardt and Turok
April 2008 – June 2008 The Cosmic
Century: A History of Astrophysics and Cosmology Malcolm Longair
March 2008 Dr.
Richard McCray, astrophysicist from CU, gave a talk about supernovae.
January 2008 – February 2008 Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes
Alexei Vilenkin
September 2007 – December
2007 Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the
Universe’s Hidden Dimensions
Lisa Randall
April
2007 – August 2007 An Introduction to Modern Cosmology Andrew
Liddle
January
2007 – March 2007 General Relativity from A to B Robert Geroch
August
2006 – December 2006 Black
Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous
Legacy Kip Thorne
April
2006 – July 2006 Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension Michio Kaku
May
2005 – March 2006 Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe Roger Penrose
December
2004 – April 2005 Three
Roads to Quantum Gravity Lee Smolin
June 2004 – November 2004
Fabric of the Cosmos Brian Greene
September 2003 – May 2004 Elegant
Universe Brian Greene
August 2003 “Is
‘the theory of everything’ merely the ultimate ensemble theory?” Max Tegmark
(arXiv: gr-qc/9704009v2)
April 2003 – July 2003 The
First Three Minutes Steven Weinberg [The group’s first book.]
For
more information, e-mail: jeff1.grove@gmail.com
Last updated December 27, 2011.
For one group member's favorites from the above list, see
http://www.sackett.net/FavoritesBillCosmology.htm.
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