3 ms·

I recommend you read about Gaussian random fields in cosmology. Cosmology treats the initial conditions as random, but with a distribution that is describable b

• AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Replying late, because I was on vacation, but just in case anyone reads this: There is a sense in which what you are saying is true. And yet, when people say "The dark matter distribution in the Bullet Cluster is <some non-trivial distribution>, they are not deriving that from the "few parameters" that describe the cosmological distribution. They're deriving it from what they see of the local situation in the Bullet Cluster. And then they say "dark matter explains what we see in the Bullet Cluster". That's what people are referring to when they say "a tunable parameter at each point in space". Without that, you have something that explains cosmology, but not the Bullet Cluster. With that, you have something that explains both cosmology and the Bullet Cluster (and a number of other odd things out there), but you no longer have "only a few parameters".