Author: Deanna C. Hooper

Material from the lecture From theories to observations (how to make computers do physics), which was part of the Kosmologian kesäkoulu 2024 (Cosmology Summer School 2024). This school was organised by the physics departments of the University of Helsinki and the University of Jyväskylä, and was held in Nuuksio, Finland, in May 2024. The school was aimed at undergraduate university students interested in cosmology, with no previous experience in cosmology or computational methods needed.

The lecture covers the basics of computational cosmology and model comparison. The exercise sheet consists of a jupyter notebook with an introduction to file reading, plotting, data manipulation, and data analysis in python, using only basic libraries. There is an accompanying Instructions pdf, with detailed instructions on how to set up a virtual environment and install the necessary python packages. A second jupyter notebook with the solutions to the exercises is also included.

Lecture and exercise notebook designed and presented by Deanna C. Hooper. The different realisations of the Cosmic Microwave Background power spectrum were produced using CLASS, and the Planck 2018 data file is taken from the Planck Legacy Archive.