Speaker: Martin Stringer (IAP)
Any viable theory of the formation and evolution of galaxies should be able
to broadly account for the emergent properties of the galaxy population, and
their evolution with time, in terms of fundamental physical quantities. Yet,
when citing the key processes we believe to be central to the story, we
often find ourselves listing from a vast and confusing melee of modelling
strategies & numerical simulations, rather than appealing to traditional
analytic derivations where the connections to the underlying physics are
more tangible. By re-examining both complex models and recent groundbreaking
observational surveys in the spirit of the classic theories, we investigate
to what extent the trends in the galaxy population can still be seen as an
elegant fingerprint of cosmology and fundamental physics.