2:30pm Monday January 4 in Curia II
Observational advances in Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy and large-scale structure have generated the claim that key cosmological parameters can be measured to a precision of a few percent in the next decade, but this assumes that the true cosmology lies in the parameter space of inflationary cold dark matter models. I advocate a more empirical approach in which current observations are analyzed to determine if our paradigms for structure formation (nearly scale-invariant, gaussian, adiabatic density fluctuations) are justified. This allows us to test the predictions of inflationary models and to either confirm inflation's simplest predictions or rule out the most aesthetic versions. The data are already good enough to constrain the primordial power spectrum for the popular \Lambda CDM cosmogony, and I will show these results.