Narlikar, J. V.2012-03-282012-03-282005-12-25http://hdl.handle.net/11007/1651This review gives a historical account of how cosmology has developed since the 1917 paper of Albert Einstein. Today it is a frontier level science drawing on contempo-rary astronomy as well as contemporary physics, stretching both as far as extrapolations will permit. Thanks to numerous observations at different wave-lengths, cosmologists today have their plates full. Ex-trapolations of laboratory tested physics are called for to understand all information within the framework of a standard model. The success and shortcomings of this approach are briefly discussed against the historical backdrop.enAstroparticle physicsCosmologyExtra gala-ctic astronomyArticle