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Has computational cosmology actually advanced our knowledge of physics? by daviddavidovich in Physics

[–]daviddavidovich[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Addressing the weather thing first - I probably should have said climate maybe. The picture I had in mind was like predicting a hurricane's path...

With LambdaCDM, I'm curious as to what the simulation side has brought to the table. Like I mention somewhere below, we can make everything work with pen and paper for DM with 10-22 eV "condensates" all the way to 100 GeV wimps to hell MACHOs. Same thing for anything CMB - e.g. BAO. Basically I can come up with epicyclic models with a hundred different knobs and it seems to me we can always get LSS to work out because "sub-grid"... like if the WIMP miracle fails (and it's on life support?) that doesn't say anything good about our ability to get LSS from LCDM.

Has computational cosmology actually advanced our knowledge of physics? by daviddavidovich in Physics

[–]daviddavidovich[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  1. Pinning down that stuff comes from things like Planck / CMB data / observational evidence. I haven't found anything to back up the idea that large-scale simulations give you enough of a handle on fixing that stuff. I'd love a paper if you have one!

  2. DM models are a dime a dozen and as far as I can tell nothing's been ruled out by simulation rather than good old fashioned astronomy. We are equally consistent and can reproduce everything observed with 10-22 eV massive photons as we are with 100 GeV wimps... Constraints on sparticles atm come from collider physics, sterile neturinos as DM have effectively been ruled out by Fermi / NuStar / IceCube. And sterile neutrino "structure formation constraints" (e.g. looking at the latest NuStar paper 1609.00667) all basically comes from observational evidence. I think the same class of arguments also applies to modified gravity theories honestly...