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
m and lower
, 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.