Einstein's legacy: relativistic cosmology

Abstract

This review gives a historical account of how cosmology has developed since the 1917 paper of Albert Einstein. Today it is a frontier level science drawing on contemporary astronomy as well as contemporary physics, stretching both as far as extrapolations will permit. Thanks to numerous observations at different wavelengths, cosmologists today have their plates full. Extrapolations of laboratory tested physics are called for to understand all information within the framework of a standard model. The success and shortcomings of this approach are briefly discussed against the historical backdrop.