<p>This last term I taught <a href=”http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/371/”>Introduction to Cosmology</a>, a course for graduate students at the University of Chicago (although some undergrads typically do take it). While I have been known to pass myself off as a professional cosmologist, I’ve never found it a particularly easy course to teach. The straightforward reason is that it’s a big universe out there, and not much time to cover it. The UofC is on a quarter system, so a term is only ten weeks of classes; this makes it hard to squeeze in as much material as you would be able to in an ordinary semester. </p> <p>More importantly, though, cosmology is a mess. Unlike most other subjects that would have a course devoted to them, there is no sense in which cosmology is a single logical structure that is built up from a small number of axioms. […]

Original post by Sean and Elliott Back