Over recent decades, cosmology has become a precise and predictive empirical science, culminating in the ΛCDM model and an extraordinary wealth of high-quality observations. Yet despite this success, profound limits may remain on what cosmology can ultimately tell us about the fundamental nature of its key ingredients, including inflation, dark matter and dark energy.
Cosmological observations probe gravity, structure formation and the evolution of spacetime, but often constrain effective behaviour rather than unique underlying microphysics. Very different theories, from new matter sectors to modifications of gravity, can produce similar large-scale observables. Increasingly precise measurements may therefore not always translate into correspondingly deeper understanding of fundamental physics.
This workshop will bring together experts in cosmology, large-scale structure, the cosmic microwave background and fundamental theory to assess systematically what fundamental physics can, and cannot, be learned from cosmological observations. We will ask which questions about gravity, cosmic initial conditions and new degrees of freedom are empirically tractable, and which may remain fundamentally underdetermined.
By bringing observers and theorists together, the workshop aims to develop a more realistic understanding of the ultimate reach of cosmology and to identify areas where future observations and theoretical work have the greatest potential to deliver genuine progress in fundamental physics.
LOC: David Alonso, Joseph Conlon, Pedro G. Ferreira, Jocelyn Monroe and Maria Vincenzi