Statistical Physics for Cosmic Structures 2005th Edition

From the reviews:

“Any book on an interdisciplinary subject must build up a self-consistent theory able to explain a great number of observations. The concepts introduced must be pertinent for the phenomena in question and sufficiently elaborated in order to extract solid conclusions in an clear and concise way. These requirements have been perfectly fulfilled in the material presented in this book. … the book is highly recommendable due to the insight it gives into the field of cosmic structures, providing sound basis for further research.” (J. M. Rubi, Journal of Statistical Physics, 2006)

The physics of scale-invariant and complex systems is a novel interdisciplinary field. Its ideas allow us to look at natural phenomena in a radically new and original way, eventually leading to unifying concepts independent of the detailed structure of the systems. The objective is the study of complex, scale-invariant, and more general stochastic structures that appear both in space and time in a vast variety of natural phenomena, which exhibit new types of collective behaviors, and the fostering of their understanding. This book has been conceived as a methodological monograph in which the main methods of modern statistical physics for cosmological structures and density fields (galaxies, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, etc.) are presented in detail. The main purpose is to present clearly, to a workable level, these methods, with a certain mathematical accuracy, providing also some paradigmatic examples of applications. This should result in a new and more general frameworkfor the statistical analysis of the many new data concerning the different cosmic structures which characterize the large scale Universe and for their theoretical interpretation and modeling.