Hello, losers (Headnote: I promise to turn down the vocabulary because all it's just very non-fruitful to use heavy words and prevent people from grasping what I am trying to convey. And also that this one is going to be a long one.). So here goes.
Now that we have set the stage for everything to work out and begin our journey to the stars, let's take a look at how our curiosity to know the cosmos got ignited. This article will focus on the description of four 'characters' who changed the course of human history in the vast field of science. So let's start with the heavens themselves.
The night sky has always made man wonder about the power and purpose it shares. Moreover, the sky was equivalent to a screen with a lot of characters and the little twinkling dots of light helped our ancestors to navigate atop the land and continue the trail of survival. They tried making sense of the little dots in a way that helped them fulfill their sole purpose of staying alive and passing on their genes to the next generation. They turned it into superstition and tried explaining it in terms of a much higher power or what you now call God. As time flew by, the human mind making more and more sense of the sky with logic instead of just worshipping what they can't even see or feel because in the early years it was not a matter of science as much as it was of Mythologies and Philosophies for it signified the human tendency to link overwhelming things directly to a higher power. As a result, many people such as Tycho Brahe, Thales, Confucius, Ptolemy etc., tried explaining the motion of the heavenly bodies as the sun, moon and planets in a rather mythical manner. They proclaimed that God made Earth the center of the universe and set all of the planets and stars into motion around it. The church accepted the notion and made it mandatory for everyone to follow what it says. But for some people, neither the notion, nor the trip to the universe was smooth. Because what the church said then and some religious companies still say was and continues to be nothing more than irrelevant gibber-gabber. (At least in my opinion).
Some people like Aristotle disagreed on the fact that God, which is so great, was so limited in imagination that he made only what we can see. Rather, he insisted on a yet grander stage, a gargantuan cosmos that lies behind the drapes of our superstitions. The whole story of Aristotle tells us that it is kind of brave but at the same time lame and stupid to take a fight directly with the caretakers of God (as long as you're not a naked human looking straight ear organism from a planet called hallelujah [PK]). For Aristotle was burnt alive in front of the public for trying to revert their understanding of the universe.
A similar, yet less terrifying fate was met by another great astronomer, Galileo Galilee in the 16th century. He is the reason why we have Telescopes today. He corrected the notions of motion which people have had since Aristotle. For there were lot of discrepancies in the motion of planets such as Jupiter and Venus,contradicting experiment and observations. He did it by mathematics and change of trail i.e. explaining that all the planets revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. Although, this advancement was only celebrate for a short time. For Galileo's ideas conflicted with the church's ideas and therefore, God. He was put into house arrest for his discoveries. (So ironic, the people who preach God, arrest people who try to find his purpose).
The revolution was then led by an English physicist, Isaac Newton in the 17th century when he finally pulled off the covers from the mysteries that haunted the scientific community namely, Effects of Gravity and the nature of time and space. A full description of his works will compromise with the length of this article, so we will just talk about gravity as explained by Newton. Although his works with gravity explained a lot of phenomena, he developed calculus, that too in the time of world plague. But there were still some unwelded links in the reason to HOW did gravity do what it does. Isaac Newton, undoubtedly, changed the way we thought of the workings of the universe and nature of space and time until the ultimate legend got his particles constituted and revolutionized the human thought process. Period. You guessed it right. The man with the '?' sign, the legend himself, Albert Einstein. (Here I will just enumerate some of the discoveries he made regarding gravity, but please be sure of an article solely dedicated to him.).
Now, Einstein tried and modified the equations of gravity as suggest by Newton but that still didn't help as he thought upon carrying the legacy Newton made. So, he started thinking about it and did some thought experiments so as to understand gravity and he actually did when he found that accelerated objects give rise to gravity. He said and I quote: "matter tells spacetime how to curve and spacetime tells matter how to move." He also helped in understanding the nature of space and time with through his special theory of relativity(SRT) which is a modification of the general theory of relativity(GRT) but without gravity, or perhaps, acceleration. Ironically, the special case came before the real case. (SRT-1905 and GRT-1915). But general public and physicists we're still puzzled that how can two objects affect each other despite being separated by millions of light years, (1 light year =940000000000000 kms) that it needed a final ingredient to brew the broth of gravity.
There were many others like Archimedes, Edmond Halley, Robert Hooke, Roger Penrose, Minkowski, Euler who contributed equally due the course of history in the scientific development but writing about all of them will compromise with my space and your time. They will always be remembered and their names will always be written in platinum words in the ultimate book of science, the cosmos itself. Later.