English

Occam's razor meets WMAP

Astrophysics 2014-10-13 v1

Abstract

Using a variety of quantitative implementations of Occam's razor we examine the low quadrupole, the ``axis of evil'' effect and other detections recently made appealing to the excellent WMAP data. We find that some razors {\it fully} demolish the much lauded claims for departures from scale-invariance. They all reduce to pathetic levels the evidence for a low quadrupole (or any other low \ell cut-off), both in the first and third year WMAP releases. The ``axis of evil'' effect is the only anomaly examined here that survives the humiliations of Occam's razor, and even then in the category of ``strong'' rather than ``decisive'' evidence. Statistical considerations aside, differences between the various renditions of the datasets remain worrying.

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0604410,
  title  = {Occam's razor meets WMAP},
  author = {Joao Magueijo and Rafael D. Sorkin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0604410},
  year   = {2014}
}