The blog of Hilton Ratcliffe

The process of assembling the collection of ideas that would go into my paper for the 2008 ASSA symposium vividly brought back to me how much I feared some of the concepts in cosmology that were placed before me as a student. I didn’t think I would ever master Relativity, and I was terrified of [...]

From chapter 11, The Virtue of Heresy:
A few years ago, I had the great privilege of sharing a supper table with some of the finest scientific minds of my era. Directly opposite me sat Professor Huseyin Yilmaz, formerly of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University, a hallowed and ivy-decked place where Albert Einstein [...]

Is Cosmology fact or fiction, science or fairy tale? Do we need it? is it good for us? Does it have any useful purpose? Should we be confined to a Standard Model?