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In sci.astro Perfectly Innocent wrote:
[...]

Physicists are stuck on the FRW cosmological models and they won't let
go because 1) legends are sacrosanct and 2) they're insulted by the
infinite variety of equally reasonable geometries that mathematicians
are familiar with. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/9804/9804006.pdf

The paper you cite is by a physicist, not a mathematician.

Correct. Jean-Pierre Luminet, Observatoire de Paris-Meudon,
Departement d'Astrophysique Relativiste et de Cosmologie.
But that doesn't mean that Luminet's survey paper has anything
commendable to say about Einstein or the majority of 20th century
relativists.

Furthermore, the "exotic" topologies Luminet talks about are all FRW
cosmological models -- specifically, quotient spaces of standard simply
connected FRW models by finite groups.

There is nothing "exotic" about the FRW cosmological models according
to Luminet. He writes:

"Such fruitful ideas of cosmic topology remained widely ignored by the
main stream of big bang cosmology. Perhaps the Einstein-de Sitter
model (1932), which assumed Euclidean space and eluded the topological
question, had a negative influence on the development of the field.
Almost all subsequent textbooks and monographies on relativistic
cosmology assumed that the global structure of the universe was either
the finite hypersphere, or the infinite Euclidean space, or the
infinite hyperbolic space, without mentioning at all the topological
indeterminacy."

Your claim that physicists ignore these topological possibilities
is simply wrong.

I only meant to emphasize what Luminet has already written:

"Until 1995, investigations in cosmic topology were rather scarce."

"Cosmologists must face the fact that a negatively curved space with a
finite volume is necessarily multi-connected."

See, for example, the September 1998 issue of _Classical and Quantum
Gravity_,

How many physicists are reading your journal and how many physicists
still trust their outdated GR textbooks?

Eugene Shubert
http://www.everythingimportant.org