[Physicist]

Einstein supposed the universe was beautiful. But Graham Farmelo reports that new evidence points the other way.

The universe is the way it is, and not how we would wish it to be.

This did not come from astronomers studying supernovae but from a satellite, located on the other side of the moon.

Wrong. It is located at the Earth's L2 point with respect to the sun, not the moon's L2 point with respect to the Earth:

Astronomer David Spergel says: "Remarkably, all the evidence from different cosmological sources now fits together, giving a simple description of the universe from its origins in the big bang 137 billion years ago."

Typo, should be 13.7 billion years.

[PatrickHenry]

I was going to mention those same two points, until I got to your post. For what it's worth, I'm still betting on Einstein. Quintessence (or whatever it's styled these days) is ugly.

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

From This article about the BOOMERANG results

"Think of it this way," explains Bock. "If we were to balance on a large ball, we would certainly feel the curvature beneath our feet. Expand that ball to the size of the Earth, and we experience that space as flat. Now think about blowing up that ball to a cosmic scale, and you can imagine how inflation would vastly flatten the visible universe."

I've never understood why infaltion models imply anything other than locally flat curvature. Can you recommend any technical readings on this?