[cetacea]

> I'm not sure anything has actually been figured out by a professional Cosmologist

You are 100% wrong. Several Nobel prizes have been awarded for seminal results in cosmology, like observation of the cosmic microwave background and the discovery of accelerated metric expansion.

[scottlocklin]

The observation of cosmic microwave background radiation was done by Penzias and Wilson, working on practical stuff (though Wilson was an astronomer, I think by training). It was explained as cosmic background by Dicke, who was a tremendously productive optical and atomic physicist. None of these guys were considered "cosmologists" -none of them did "cosmology" and the title of "cosmologist" didn't even exist in those days. Penzias actually caught a lot of flack as director of Bell Labs for shutting down a lot of the speculative stuff there.

I'm not sure what the other thing you're referring to is, but I used to go to some of Joe Taylor's seminars: he was an astronomer, not a cosmologist. Cosmologists are people who publish papers that can't be tested by people like Penzias, Wilson and Taylor.

[cetacea]

> Cosmologists are people who publish papers that can't be tested

Once again you are wrong. Mather, Smoot, Perlmutter, and Riess are all cosmologists. Their Nobel prizes were awarded for results in cosmology.

Your idiosyncratic redefinition of the word "cosmology" is completely at odds with how the word is used in the physics community.