Not that the always-cautious Peebles now embraced the Big Bang theory. But the uniformity of the microwave background that he had predicted and that Penzias and Wilson had detected would certainly correspond to a universe that looked the same on the largest scales no matter where you were in it. Einstein had posited an elephant on an incline, and that’s what the universe turned out to be: homogeneous. “Which is an amazing thing,” Peebles thought. “But there it is: The universe is simple.”
