(Part 2) Best products from r/astrophysics

Yes!

If you don't know any calculus Stewart Calculus is the typical primer in colleges. Combine this with Khan Academy for easy mode cruise control.

After that, you want to look at The Big Orange Book, which is essentially the bible for undergrad astrophysics and 100% useful beyond that. This book could, alone, tell you everything you need to know.

As for other topics like differential equations and linear algebra you can shop around. I liked Linear Algebra Done Right for linear personally. No recommendations from me on differential equations though, never found a book that I loved.

At a more advanced level I'd recommend Dan Moaz's Astrophysics in a Nutshell. That book was pretty much how I made it through the qualifier. Great mix of math&theory

For an astronomy 101 type textbook I would recommend Bennett's The Essential Cosmic Perspective. There are plenty of other 101 level books out there too if you just look around Amazon. If you want a meatier undergrad text book, I would recommend Carroll and Ostlie's Introduction to Modern Astrophysics (also known to many as the Big Orange Book, AKA BOB). BOB covers almost all the basics of astrophysics and has 30 chapter, if I recall correctly, but you'll probably want some grounding in college physics and math before diving too far into it.

Also, it may be worth checking out is Nick Strobel's site, www.astronomynotes.com. It has some good intro-level material.

Nope! All wrong! Not even close, but thats OK!

The book you're really looking for but didn't realize you wanted to read is Deep Down Things by Bruce A. Schumm. Goes into particle physics (including light but that's a simplification and you'll understand why when you read it) of all types and with excellent detail, aimed for the layperson with a basic foundation and sacrifices very little for the sake of explanation.

Light, particles, dark matter, higgs, all of it is in there. Go read it.

That being said, this is some off the wall shit man. Two points for creativity!

50 Physics Ideas You Really Need to Know. I read it for the first time when I was about your age and definitely was an inspiration for me to then go onto studying physics at university. Really well written and helps people at any level understand more about the world around us.

It's a bit old so won't discuss many of the more recent findings, but the absolute best undergraduate astrophysics book I know of is Frank Shu's The Physical Universe. I worked through the whole book studying for my prelims in grad school. :-)

If you want to read some great books on astrophysics and quantum physics, I recommend the books written by Professors Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw: Universal and The Quantum Universe

They are brilliant books and deliberately shy away from using any complex mathematics, explaining in detail all of the maths that is used.

I took an intro astro course and they made us use this book. Just an earlier version, sure the last one has some better pictures and maybe explains stuff better/differently, but I picked it up for 5 bucks and it is one of my favorite textbooks ever/so far.

The big bang is not usually simulated if you mean a computers simulation. The reason is you need a code that does high energy quark-gluon plasma calculations inside of a general-relativistic framework that models how through cooling this plasma gives rise to stable atoms.

Though in theory it's possible, writing a code that could model each item correctly would be very difficult.

However, using analytical calculations the basic results of the above scenario is not that bad. That components that you add are metric for general relativity, the spectral index for inflation, the Lagrangian for the high energy particles involved, etc...

If you would like to see how these kinds of calculations are done check out this textbook from a library. See especially the chapters on the "very early universe", "inflation' and gravitational instabilities in GR.

https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/1469246864

You'll love this

Cambridge University Press has an excellent series of astronomy books that are written at a undergraduate level. For an amateur as myself they really hit the spot for self-study. Overall easy to read but still quite detailed with a few challanging parts.


An introduction to Galaxies and cosmology by Jones & Lambourne

An introduction to the Sun and stars by Green & Jones

An introduction to the Solar system by McBride & Gilmour

I'm almost done reading Einstein for Dummies. No really, ignore the "for Dummies" and read the reviews. It's an interesting introduction and history into where these ideas of Einstein's came from and why they were important. As a software developer, you might find it a little lacking on details and math, but I liked this since I was trying to absorb so many ideas all in one book.

As well as the above book I used Burke & Smith as my introduction to RA, then used Interferometry and Synthesis a lot later on

When I was young and impatient to learn the math underlying GR, I enjoyed this book:

A Brief on Tensor Analysis (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics) https://www.amazon.com/dp/038794088X

What you want is Night Watch by Terrance Dickinson

Anyone have thoughts on "Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle"?