Modeling Physical Processes at Galactic Scales and Above
  What should these lectures be? The subject assigned to us is so broad that
many books can be written about it. So, in planning these lectures I had
several options. One would be to focus on a narrow subset of topics and to
cover them in great detail. Such a subset necessarily would be highly personal
and useful to a few read- ers at best. Another option would be to give a very
shallow overview of the whole field, but then it won't be very much different
from a highly compressed version of a university course (which anyone can take
if they wish so). So, I decided to be selfish and to prepare these lectures as
if I was teaching my own graduate student. Given my research interests, I
selected what the student would need to know to be able to discuss science with
me and to work on joint research projects. So, the story presented below is
both personal and incomplete, but it does cover several subjects that are
poorly represented in the existing textbooks (if at all). Some of topics I
focus on below are closely connected, others are disjoint, some are just side
detours on specific technical questions. There is an overlapping theme,
however. Our goal is to follow the cosmic gas from large scales, low densities,
(rel- atively) simple physics to progressively smaller scales, higher
densities, closer rela- tion to galaxies, and more complex and uncertain
physics. So, we (you - the reader, and me - the author) are going to follow a
"yellow brick road" from the gas well be- yond any galaxy confines to the
actual sites of star formation and stellar feedback. On the way we will stop at
some places for a tour and run without looking back through some others. So,
the road will be uneven, but I hope that some readers find it useful.
