“Boy, this is silly,” Peebles thought. Why, he asked himself, would anyone imagine the universe to be, of all the things that a universe could be, simple? Yes, scientists preferred to follow the principle of Ockham’s razor, dating back to the fourteenth-century Franciscan friar William of Ockham: Try the simplest assumptions first and add complications only as necessary. So Einstein’s invocation of a homogeneous universe had a certain logic to it, a legacy behind it—but not enough to be the basis of a science that made predictions that led to observations.
