After the dark ages* *Dedicated to Sir Michael Berry, a much admired colleague, on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

Abstract

After recalling some puzzles in cosmology and briefly reviewing the Friedmann–Lemaître cosmos a simple unified model of the ‘dark sector’ is described. This model involves a scalar field and a pseudo-scalar axion field that give rise to dark energy in the form of ‘quintessence’ and to ‘fuzzy’ dark matter, respectively. Predictions of the model concerning the late-time evolution of the Universe and possible implications for the problem of the observed matter–antimatter asymmetry in the Universe are sketched.