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OATS-DAUT SEMINAR
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Speaker: Roberto Trotta (Imperial College London, UK)

Title: Building (and doubting) the cosmological concordance model

Date: Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
Time: 12:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni

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Abstract: There are things we know, things we know we don't know, and then there are things we don't know we don't know. The later two issues can be consistently addressed in a Bayesian framework, which considerably expands the scope and power of our statistical tools. In this talk I will first present some ideas stemming from a Bayesian approach to cosmological model building, which provides a consistent framework for answering questions such as: is dark energy evolving with time? What can we say about the primordial spectrum of density fluctuations? Is the Universe flat? Have we detected hints of new physics in the sky? I will then introduce the notion of "doubt" to quantify the degree of (dis)belief in a model given observational data in the absence of explicit alternative models. I will illustrate how a properly calibrated doubt can lead to model discovery in the absence of explicit alternatives. The outlook for the application to the current cosmological concordance model will also be discussed.
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contact: Paolo Molaro (OATS)