ABSTRACT
Our development of theoretical cosmology has benefited greatly from the principles and methods we have learned in the laboratory, on Earth, our local corner of the Galaxy and, more recently, via measurements made of the largest structures and distances using a wide assortment of instruments. Einstein’s motivation for proposing his cosmological theory was a desire to encapsulate Mach’s principle in a closed homogeneous world model. Without question, however, the greatest contribution to our view of the Universe was Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which takes space and time and folds them into a single interwoven unit. Einstein’s theory of special relativity provides an elegant resolution of Zeno’s paradox. Two years after the advent of special relativity, Einstein was writing a review on the new physics, which at the time he called invariance theory, when he began to wonder how Newtonian gravitation could be modified to make it consistent with the new relativity theory.
