The Physics of Microwave Background Anisotropies

Abstract

Cosmic microwave background anisotropies provide a vast amount of information on both structure formation in the universe and the background dynamics and geometry. The full physical content and detailed structure of anisotropies can be understood in a simple and intuitive fashion through a systematic investigation of the individual mechanisms for anisotropy formation, based on elementary gravitational and fluid dynamics.Comment: 12pgs, uuencoded postscript, 5 figures included, full page color figures and stripped version available at ftp://pac2.berkeley.edu/pub/hu/physic