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Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a good model. When addressing global properties of the Universe or its initial state this becomes a particularly pressing issue. How to assess the probability of the Universe as a whole is empirically ambiguous, since we can examine only part of a single realisation of the system under investigation: at some point, data will run out. We review the basics of applying Bayesian statistical explanation to the Universe as a whole. We argue that a conventional Bayesian approach to model inference generally fails in such circumstances, and cannot resolve, e.g., the so-called measure problem in inflationary cosmology. Implicit and non-empirical valuations inevitably enter model assessment in these cases. This undermines the possibility to perform Bayesian model comparison. One must therefore either stay silent, or pursue a more general form of systematic and rational model assessment. We outline a generalised axiological Bayesian model inference framework, based on mathematical lattices. This extends inference based on empirical data (evidence) to additionally consider the properties of model structure (elegance) and model possibility space (beneficence). We propose this as a natural and theoretically well-motivated framework for introducing an explicit, rational approach to theoretical model prejudice and inference beyond data.
I argue that some important elements of the current cosmological model are conventionalist in the sense defined by Karl Popper. These elements include dark matter and dark energy; both are auxiliary hypotheses that were invoked in response to observa
In these lectures the present status of the so-called standard cosmological model, based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm is reviewed. Special emphasis is given to the origin of the cosmological perturbations we see today unde
We study transition rates and cross sections from first principles in a spatially flat radiation dominated cosmology. We consider a model of scalar particles to study scattering and heavy particle production from pair annihilation, drawing more gener
In String Gas Cosmology, the simplest shape modulus fields are naturally stabilized by taking into account the presence of string winding and momentum modes. We determine the resulting effective potential for these fields and show that it obeys the d
Gravitational particle production in time variable metric of an expanding universe is efficient only when the Hubble parameter $H$ is not too small in comparison with the particle mass. In standard cosmology, the huge value of the Planck mass $M_{Pl}