Einstein

For thousands of years, philosophers and astronomers and thinkers of all sorts have imagined that the universe, the space around us, was rather like this floor in front of us. It was fixed and unchangeable, and things happen on it, just as people walk around. So the stars, the comets, and the planets, and the other heavenly bodies moved around and traced down their parts on this completely unchanging stage of space. In the 20th century, as a result of Einstein's work, that view of the universe was completely transformed. We began to understand that there was no absolutely fixed stage of space at all on which all celestial notions were played out. But in some sense on the larger scale in the universe, space itself was in this state of a continuous dynamic change. That was a prediction made by Einstein. But it was the astronomer Edwin Hubble who is the owner of the honor of making the discovery that our universe was really like that.