"When we look out into the Universe, the stuff we can see must be close enough for light to have reached us since the Universe began. The universe is about 14 billion years old, so at first glance it's easy to think that we cannot see things more than 14 billion light years away.
"That's not quite right, however. Because the Universe is expanding, the most distant visible things are much further away than that. In fact, the photons in the cosmic microwave background have travelled a cool 45 billion light years to get here. That makes the visible universe some 90 billion light years across.
"That's big but the universe is almost certainly much bigger. The question than many cosmologists have pondered is how much bigger. Today we have an answer thanks to some interesting statistical analysis by Mihran Vardanyan at the University of Oxford and a couple of buddies."
Bayesian Statistics is covered in Data Analysis courses in Astrophysics. From Scholarpedia.org: "Bayesian statistics is a system for describing epistemological uncertainty using the mathematical language of probability. In the 'Bayesian paradigm,'degrees of belief in states of nature are specified; these are non-negative, and the total belief in all states of nature is fixed to be one. Bayesian statistical methods start with existing 'prior' beliefs, and update these using data to give 'posterior' beliefs, which may be used as the basis for inferential decisions."
I've been blogging about social commentary for a minute, and felt it time to "go geek."
Physics arXiv: Applications Of Bayesian Model Averaging To The Curvature And Size Of The Universe
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