Interpreting the Kitchen Sink: a Path Towards Better Understanding Galaxy Evolution
John Forbes

Abstract:

Galaxy formation is a field currently overwhelmed by data, from large surveys to cosmological simulations. As the simulations continue to improve their matches to the observations, some have been left wondering whether the basic picture of galaxy evolution is settled. I will argue that this is far from the case, and that a sophisticated new generation of semi-analytic models and statistical techniques are needed to simultaneously address the strong degeneracies that persist in the problem of galaxy evolution and to coherently comprehend the vast quantities of extant and forthcoming data.