Cosmology and Energy

This morning’s plenaries have been great. We got a look at just how concordant the concordance model of cosmology. The amount of different information – supernovae, relic elemental abundances, CMB, and galactic clusters – that can be explained by dark matter, dark energy, and inflation is remarkable. Steven Chu’s talk about what physicists can do about the energy problem was encouraging, but at the end it was clear that until the US consumer comes around, it will be hard to make progress.