Preface to the first edition

Summary

Ever since I wrote my semi-popular book The Ultimate Fate of the Universe I have been meaning to write a technical version of it. There are of course many good books on cosmology and it seemed doubtful to me whether the inclusion of a chapter on the distant future of the universe would itself justify another book. However, in recent years there have been two interesting developments in cosmology, namely inflationary models and quantum cosmology, with their connection with particle physics and quantum mechanics, and I believe the time is ripe for a book containing these topics. Accordingly, this book has a chapter each on inflationary models, quantum cosmology and the distant future of the universe (as well as a chapter on singularities not usually contained in the standard texts).

This is essentially an introductory book. None of the topics dealt with have been treated exhaustively. However, I have tried to include enough introductory material and references so that the reader can pursue the topic of his interest further.

A knowledge of general relativity is helpful; I have included a brief exposition of it in Chapter 2 for those who are not familiar with it. This material is very standard; the form given here is taken essentially from my book Rotating Fields in General Relativity.

In the process of writing this book, I discovered two exact cosmological solutions, one connecting radiation and matter dominated eras and the other representing an inflationary model for a sixth degree potential. These have been included in Sections 4.5 and 9.4 respectively as I believe they are new and have some physical relevance.