This website contains a tutorial that goes through the basic principles of Cosmology. It begins by doing a historical review of the discoveries that led to the current theory of how Universe is. The following sections deal with the concepts of homogeneity and isotropy, measuring distances, effects of gravity, geometry of space, horizons and inflation, and finally how projects like COBE provide astronomers with evidence of the mass distribution in our Universe.
This chapter continues the examination and clarification of concepts relating to point objects, for which as argued in Chapter 1, appropriate, complex/ second order, concepts relate to words like ‘distribution’, ‘dispersion’, ‘density’, ‘pattern’ and ‘scale’ and, at higher level still, third order concepts relating to point process models, stationarity and isotropy/anisotropy.
