Closing in on the Cosmos: Cosmology's Rebirth and the Rise of the Dark
  Matter Problem
  Influenced by the renaissance of general relativity that came to pass in the
1950s, the character of cosmology fundamentally changed in the 1960s as it
became a well-established empirical science. Although observations went to
dominate its practice, extra-theoretical beliefs and principles reminiscent of
methodological debates in the 1950s kept playing an important tacit role in
cosmological considerations. Specifically, belief in cosmologies that modeled a
"closed universe" based on Machian insights remained influential. The rise of
the dark matter problem in the early 1970s serves to illustrate this hybrid
methodological character of cosmological science.
