Steve Weinberg's Big Picture

For physics students of my generation, there were three new General Relativity textbooks: Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler; The Large Scale Stucture of Space Time, by Hawking and Ellis, and Gravitation and Cosmology by Weinberg. Each became an instant classic. Hawking and Ellis is a somewhat specialized and advanced treatise but the others were wide ranging texts with lots of cosmology in them.

Thirty-five cosmologically eventful years have passed since then, and there are a few new and notable books on GR and cosmology on my bookshelves, but perhaps this is a good time for Weinberg's forthcoming new book (listed for May, 2008) Cosmology.

Weinberg has a lucid and penetrating style and is a prolific and graceful writer of both classic textbooks and popular science, not to mention a Nobel Prize winning physics god. I haven't seen or ordered his new book yet, but the prospect looks inviting. Besides G&C he has previously written a terrific popular book on cosmological origins called The First Three Minutes

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