About the course
This is a course in cosmology which aims to equip you with an overview of the different aspects of physics that are required to understand (or start playing a part in) research in this exciting and rapidly-evolving field.
In a normal year, the class time is divided into a mixture of discussion, explanation, and blackboard derivations.
This year, the class will be fully remote and each week I will provide a guided programme of learning consisting of up to 90 minutes of video content, interspersed with reading recommendations and exercises (see below). We will then have a class meeting over Zoom of up to 90 minutes, where I will recap the most important areas and provide opportunity for discussion and feedback.
It is essential that you engage with the exercises and either the week’s videos or written material – preferably both – ahead of the class meeting. Naturally, it’s completely fine if there are things you don’t understand or can’t complete – the whole point of the class meetings is to help you with that. But the class meeting will not be useful for you unless you have at least watched/read the material, and had a stab at that week’s activities.
In return, I will offer as many routes as possible for you to feed back on your learning and any points that you want to focus on in the live sessions.
If you have any queries at all, please contact me:
a.pontzen@ucl.ac.uk.
About the exercises in the lecture notes
I’ve included exercises dotted throughout the course lecture notes. They appear in gray boxes and are categorised:
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☞ Exercises with this icon are essential for your understanding of the course material.
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📝 Exercises with this icon are also essential and additionally will be collected and marked (see below). More information about homework deadlines will be posted to the moodle in due course.
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😇Exercises with this icon are optional, and are recommended if you want a deeper understanding or need to revise background material. In particular, this course contains a rapid summary of results from general relativity. If you haven’t done a GR course before, I’d definitely encourage you to work carefully through the optional exercises in Chapters 2 – 4 to fill out your understanding.
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A few exercises get this icon. They are optional,
and are also pretty hard (or encourage some really deep thought).
Unlike the three types of exercise above, they go significantly beyond the
level required for getting a first class exam result – they are for the
theoretical cosmology researcher/ninja.
Assessment
The assessment of this course is based on:
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90% of marks from the final examination. This exam is targetted at assessing your physical understanding and ability to perform calculations. It’s not supposed to be a memory test – only a handful of the most major equations, which I’ll point out during the lectures, need to be recalled.
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10% of marks from the assessed exercises which must be completed on your own. Some of these exercises are in the notes, marked by a 📝 symbol (see above); others will be issued separately and are based on past examinations. They all reinforce your understanding and will equip you to do very well in the examination component. More information about homeworks and deadlines will be posted to the moodle in due course.