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Issac Newton
Laws of motion, law of universal gravitation, basis for classical physics -
William Herschel
Discovered Uranus, made hypothesis that nebulae are composed of stars and theory of stellar evolution -
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Published his nebular hypothesis, arguing that the planets formed from a mass of incandescent gas. -
Percival Lowell
Discovered canals and oasis on Mars -
Henrietta Leavitt
Devised a north-polar system to determine a star's magnitude. -
Willem de Sitter
Researched on planet Jupiter, proposed theory of dark matter and came up with the concept of the de Sitter space and de Sitter universe, a solution for where there is no matter. -
Harlow Shapley
Deduced that the Sun lies near the central plane of the Galaxy, found pulsating stars. -
Georges Lemaître
He was the person to propose the theory of the expansion of the universe. -
Albert Einstein
publishes the Special Theory of Relativity, positing that space and time are not separate continuums. -
Albert Einstein
He publishes the General Theory of Relativity which requires a finite spherical universe. Einstein used his spherical ellipsoidal geometry of General Relativity to propose curved space. What stops finite spherical universe gravitationally collapsing? Einstein proposed his Cosmological / Antigravity Constant. -
Edward Hubble
Hubble established that some nebulae (fuzzy patches of light on the night sky) were indeed distant galaxies comparable in size to our own Milky Way.
Hubble discovers the red shift with distance. If Doppler shift caused this redshift then it meant stars / galaxies were moving apart. This is interpretated as evidence that the universe is expanding. -
Fred Hoyle
coins the phrase "Big Bang'', and the name stuck. i.e. the Universe had been born at one moment, about ten thousand million years ago in the past and the galaxies were still travelling away from us after that initial burst. All the matter, indeed the Universe itself, was created at just one instant. -
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson
discovered a cosmic microwave background radiation. This was interpreted as the faint afterglow of the intense radiation of a Hot Big Bang, which had been predicted by Alpher and Hermann back in 1949.