Related papers: Testing the Multiverse: Bayes, Fine-Tuning and Typ…
In almost every scientific field, an experiment involves collecting data and then analysing it. The analysis stage will often consist in trying to extract some physical parameter and estimating its uncertainty; this is known as Parameter…
The great advances in the network of cosmological tests show that the relativistic Big Bang theory is a good description of our expanding universe. But the properties of nearby galaxies that can be observed in greatest detail suggest a…
Hypothesis testing and model choice are quintessential questions for statistical inference and while the Bayesian paradigm seems ideally suited for answering these questions, it faces difficulties of its own ranging from prior modelling to…
The accelerating expansion of the universe presents an exciting, fundamental challenge to the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. I highlight some of the outstanding challenges in both developing theoretical models and…
The $\Lambda$CDM cosmology passes demanding tests that establish it as a good approximation to reality, but it could be improved. I present a list of possibly interesting and less well explored things that might yield hints to a better…
Cosmological fine-tuning has traditionally been associated with the narrowness of the intervals in which the parameters of the physical models must be located to make life possible. A more thorough approach focuses on the probability of the…
Modern cosmological data demand modern data analysis techniques. We introduce BayOp, a new likelihood sampling and maximisation method which is based on the Bayesian Optimisation algorithm and learns a function instead of randomly sampling…
In the past decade, the importance of dissipation and fluctuation to inflationary dynamics has been realized and has led to a new picture of inflation called warm inflation. Although these phenomena are common to condensed matter systems,…
The network of cosmological tests is tight enough now to show that the relativistic Big Bang cosmology is a good approximation to what happened as the universe expanded and cooled through light element production and evolved to the present.…
A method is presented for performing joint analyses of cosmological datasets, in which the weight assigned to each dataset is determined directly by it own statistical properties. The weights are considered in a Bayesian context as a set of…
We discuss several proposals for astrophysical and cosmological tests of quantum theory. The tests are motivated by deterministic hidden-variables theories, and in particular by the view that quantum physics is merely an effective theory of…
A substantial school in the philosophy of science identifies Bayesian inference with inductive inference and even rationality as such, and seems to be strengthened by the rise and practical success of Bayesian statistics. We argue that the…
The accelerating expansion of the Universe poses a major challenge to our understanding of fundamental physics. One promising avenue is to modify general relativity and obtain a new description of the gravitational force. Because…
Recent results from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments verify several of the predictions of inflation, while ruling out a number of alternative structure-formation scenarios. Given the successes of the theory, the obvious next…
There has been significant recent progress in observational cosmology. This, in turn, has provided an unprecedented picture of the early universe and its evolution. In this review I will present a (biased) view of how one can use these…
Inflationary cosmology attempts to provide a natural explanation for the flatness and homogeneity of the observable universe. In the context of reversible (unitary) evolution, this goal is difficult to satisfy, as Liouville's theorem…
We consider the Standard Models of particle physics and hot big bang cosmology, and review the theoretical and experimental motivations for extending these models to include supersymmetry and inflation. An obvious extension would be to…
It is well known that a Bayesian probability forecast for all future observations should be a probability measure in order to satisfy a natural condition of coherence. The main topics of this paper are the evolution of the Bayesian…
In this paper, a problem of testing is discussed when the samples have been drawn from the normal distribution. The study of hypothesis testing is also extended to Baye's set up.
We review the status of bouncing cosmologies as alternatives to cosmological inflation for providing a description of the very early universe, and a source for the cosmological perturbations which are observed today. We focus on the…