We thus end up with a picture of the distribution of the density of
energy density in a flat universe represented by
Figure 1
[99].
One of the most striking things about the
present era in cosmology is the remarkable agreement between the
values of the cosmological densities and the other cosmological
parameters obtained by different methods - except possibly for the
quasar lensing data which favors a higher
m and lower
, and the arc lensing
data which favors lower values
of both parameters. If the results from the new CMB measurements end
up agreeing with those from the other methods discussed above, the
cosmological parameters will have been determined to perhaps 10%, and
cosmologists can focus their attention on the other subjects that I
mentioned at the beginning: origin of the initial fluctuations, the
nature of the dark matter and dark energy, and the formation of
galaxies and large-scale structure. Cosmologists can also speculate
on the reasons why the cosmological parameters have the values that
they do, but this appears to be the sort of question whose answer may
require a deeper understanding of fundamental physics - perhaps from
a superstring theory of everything.
|
Figure 1. The Great Seal of the United
States, found on the back of the American
dollar bill, includes a pyramid representing strength and duration,
capped by the eye of Providence. Here we use this to represent the
visible matter in the universe
( |
This work was supported in part by NSF and NASA grants and a faculty grant at UCSC. I am grateful to Leo Stodolsky for hospitality at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, and to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a Humboldt Award.
0.005), with the
upper triangle containing the eye representing the metals (elements
heavier than hydrogen and helium, with