By the time of Comte, scientists unanimously rejected the idea that there was any essential difference between celestial and terrestrial matter, but … - Gerald James Whitrow

Our idea of the universe as a whole remains a product of the imagination.

The philosophical consequences of the General Theory of Relativity are perhaps more striking than the experimental tests. As Bishop Barnes has reminded us, "The astonishing thing about Einstein's equations is that they appear to have come out of nothing." We have assumed that the laws of nature must be capable of expression in a form which is invariant for all possible transformations of the space-time co-ordinates and also that the geometry of space-time is Riemannian. From this exiguous basis, formulae of gravitation more accurate than those of Newton have been derived. As Barnes points out...

Our conscious appreciation of the fact that one event follows another is of a different kind from our awareness of either event separately. If two events are to be represented as occurring in succession, then—paradoxically—they must also be thought of simultaneously.