2008-08-22

fundamental inference

After a few edits to the faint-motion paper, I had a long conversation with Adam Bolton (Hawaii) about constraining cosmological models (on small scales) with data (such as galaxy positions, redshifts, weak lensing, and the like). He wants to advocate an approach in which we find all (or a representative sample of) realizations of the density field that are consistent with the data, and ask whether they (or any of them) are consistent with the fundamental model, for model testing. This is in contrast to the usual techniques of computing statistics on the observations, statistics on the model, and comparing them. This standard technique rarely gets you close to saturating the available information, and given the quality of the CDM model, if you want to find problems you are probably going to have to come close to saturating the information available.

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