Editing History of physics (section)

===Cosmology===
{{main|Physical cosmology}}
Cosmology may be said to have become a serious research question with the publication of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in 1915 although it did not enter the scientific mainstream until the period known as the "[[Golden age of general relativity]]".

About a decade later, in the midst of what was dubbed the "[[Great Debate (astronomy)|Great Debate]]", [[Edwin Hubble]] and [[Vesto Slipher]] discovered the [[expansion of universe]] in the 1920s measuring the redshifts of [[Doppler spectra]] from galactic nebulae. Using Einstein's general relativity, [[Georges Lemaître]] and [[George Gamow]] formulated what would become known as the [[Big Bang theory]]. A rival, called the [[steady state theory]], was devised by [[Fred Hoyle]], [[Thomas Gold]], [[Jayant Narlikar]] and [[Hermann Bondi]].

[[Cosmic microwave background radiation]] was verified in the 1960s by [[Arno Allan Penzias]] and [[Robert Woodrow Wilson]], and this discovery favoured the big bang at the expense of the steady state scenario. Later work was by [[George Smoot]] et al. (1989), among other contributors, using data from the [[Cosmic Background explorer]] (CoBE) and the [[Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe]] (WMAP) satellites refined these observations. The 1980s (the same decade of the COBE measurements) also saw the proposal of [[Inflation (cosmology)|inflation theory]] by [[Alan Guth]].

Recently the problems of dark matter and dark energy have risen to the top of the cosmology agenda.