And that was about it. We didn t know that they were part of this great pinwheel of several hundred billion stars that we now call the Milky Way Galaxy. We did know that they were moving apart from one another as cosmic space expands from a fiery beginning, the Big Bang. And we didn t have the tools, either the hardware or theoretical tools, like Einstein s Relativity Theory to begin to come to grips with the universe as a whole. We come back now at the end of the century.
Cosmology is a science.
We have these tools. There are lots of scientists working in the field. They ve got the telescopes and everything that they need. And we know the rudiments. We have, so to speak, the table stakes.