David Spergel: Determining the Universe’s Initial Conditions
Channel: Oxford ML and Physics Seminars
Date: 2021-03-11

Can we go beyond measuring the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background and recover the universe’s initial conditions? I will begin by describing some of the observational programs that will give us a more complete picture of the large-scale structure of the universe: the Rubin Observatory, the Euclid Telescope, DESI, the Roman Space Telescope and the Simons Observatory. I will then ask whether we can forward model the universe from initial conditions to match these data sets. This challenging problem will require the use of machine learning techniques to enable rapid forward modelling of the universe. I will describe recent efforts by our group at Flatiron to address this very challenging problem.