In estimating the amount of dark matter, cosmologists developing the standard model have to make some rather strong assumptions about their observati… - John Moffat

Experimentalists dream of some spectacular discovery such as the proof of the existence of black holes to justify the more than eight billion dollars it has cost to build the LHC.

Indeed, there is a now a minority of cosmologists who question a beginning of the universe at all; instead they favor a cyclic model with a series of expansions and contractions.

This is an extraordinary time in the history of science, in that we cannot only theorize about the beginning of the universe, but actually study the celestial fossils of how it happened.