If You Don't need (Astro)Statistics, You Have Done the Wrong Experiment

• Roberto Trotta (Imperial College London)

Room: CYCL01 At the beginning of last century, the physicist and Nobel Prize Winner Ernest Rutherford reportedly believed that "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment". If he were alive today, he probably would not recognize the way cosmology (the study of the Universe on its largest scale) has developed: essentially all of the exciting discoveries in the last two decades have relied on sophisticated statistical analyses of very large and complex datasets. Today, advanced astrostatistical methods belong to the toolbox of almost every cosmologist. In this talk I will give an overview of how cosmologists have established a "cosmological concordance model" that explains extraordinarily well very accurate observations ranging from the relic radiation from the Big Bang to the distribution of galaxies in the sky in the modern Universe. The emerging picture of a cosmos remains puzzling: 95% of the Universe is constituted of unknown components, dark matter and dark energy. Our understanding of the Universe is -- already today -- limited by our statistical and computational methods. I will discuss how astrostatistics will meet the challenges posed by upcoming extremely large data sets and thereby be instrumental in answering some of the most fundamental questions about the physical reality of the cosmos.

Reception and drinks Room: Cafeteria