Abstract
A review on the development of cosmology for a diverse audience is presented. The first historical part is devoted to the works done half a century ago with an emphasize to those performed in Russia (or more precisely, in the Soviet Union). Then the recent data on the cosmic microwave background raditation is discussed and the impact of these data on the neutrino mass and the number of neutrino species is considered. The latter is compared with the results obtained from the big bang nucleosynthesis. Next, a short description and history of the cosmological inflation is presented. The basics of the stan- dard cosmological model and the problems of dark matter and dark energy are considered at the end of the fist section entitled Progress. In the next short section, Problems, one can find a list of the unsolved cosmological and astrophysical problems, which is by no means fully comprehensive. The last supershort section contains a few words about the perspectives of future development.
Highlights
A review on the development of cosmology for a diverse audience is presented
The first historical part is devoted to the works done half a century ago with an emphasize to those performed in Russia
The basics of the standard cosmological model and the problems of dark matter and dark energy are considered at the end of the fist section entitled "Progress"
Summary
It is difficult to cover the impressive development of cosmology of the last half century in half an hour, so my presentation surely misses some essential contributions and in addition may be strongly biased towards Russian papers (and inside that to works done in my home institute, ITEP), some of which are not well appreciated outside Russia. Returning to the more recent era inside a half a century interval from today, it is worth mentioning two papers by Zeldovich [7] and Zeldovich, Okun, and Pikelner [8], where the so called freezing of species was first studied In these works the celebrated equation, whose solution determines the cosmological evolution of the particle density, has been derived. Twelve years later this equation was applied to the calculation of the energy density of stable massive leptons in two very similar papers [9, 10] and became known as the Lee-Weinberg equation, which should be surely changed to the Zeldovich equation.
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