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7. CONCLUSION

One of the most striking things about the present era in cosmology is the remarkable agreement between the values of the cosmological parameters obtained by different methods - except possibly for the quasar lensing data which favors a higher Omegam and lower OmegaLambda, and the arc lensing data which favors lower values of both parameters. If the results from the new CMB measurements agree with those from the other methods discussed above, the cosmological parameters will have been determined to perhaps 10%, and cosmologists can turn their attention to 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.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank Stéphane Courteau for organizing this exciting conference! I am grateful to my students and colleagues for helpful discussions. This work was supported in part by NSF and NASA grants at UCSC.