By Maurizio Gasperini, Cambridge University Press. Hardback ISBN 9780521868754 £45. E-book format ISBN 9780511332296 $68.
The standard cosmological picture of our universe emerging from a Big Bang leaves open many fundamental questions, which string theory, a unified theory of all forces of nature, should be able to answer. The first book dedicated to string cosmology, this contains a pedagogical introduction to the basic notions of the subject. It describes the new possible scenarios suggested by string theory for the primordial evolution of our universe and discusses the main phenomenological consequences of these scenarios, stressing their differences from each other, and comparing them to the more conventional models of inflation. It is self-contained, and so can be read by astrophysicists with no knowledge of string theory, and high-energy physicists with little understanding of cosmology. Detailed and explicit derivations of all the results presented provide a deeper appreciation of the subject.
