Our profound areas of ignorance notwithstanding, today, as never before, cosmology has an anchor, because the CMB reveals the portal through which we all walked. It’s a point where interesting physics happened, and where we learned about the universe before and after its light was set free. The simple discovery of the cosmic microwave background turned cosmology into something more than mythology. But it was the accurate and detailed map of the cosmic microwave background that turned cosmology into a modern science.
