Kate Storey-Fisher and I spent a long time today talking about how to build a project that is about cosmological observables, built from the concepts in her projects on applying coordinate-free geometric forms to theoretical objects in cosmology. The idea could be: Find geometric scalars that exist in the theoretical (or latent) universe, find geometric scalars that exist in any observational survey of the observable universe, and learn the relationships between these; construct cosmological tests and tests of the dark-matter model. The big issue (from my perspective) is that the symmetries that apply to the 6-dimensional phase space of the Universe are different from the symmetries that apply to the observed 3-dimensional redshift-and-angle-space of the (galaxy or quasar, say) observations. Some might say that there are no symmetries in this observational space, since there are window functions and selection functions, but this is not correct: Coordinate symmetries still exist there, it is just that these other functions must also be tracked, in the same space. Anyway, it's a nice research program to figure all this out.
No comments:
Post a Comment