A DATA REVOLUTION IN COSMOLOGY. In my conversations with my nephew Andrew Schaefer, he also mentioned that cosmology has gone from a science in which there was very little data to a science in which there is an enormous amount of data. I looked at wikipedia, and this article on observational cosmology says that: “In its infancy, cosmology was a speculative science based on a very limited number of observations….It was not until the 1990s and beyond that the astronomical observations would be able to eliminate competing theories….” Now, there is observational evidence for dark matter, and “observational evidence for dark energy was obtained in the late 1990s”.
I began this blog with a post expressing amazement that there was data confirming the Big Bang Theory (which I had always thought of as speculative—how could we know anything about what happened so long ago?). Now, there is lots of data to propose answers to new questions.