Albert Einstein

In the 1700's Thomas Wright and William Herschel (England) using an 18 inch reflecting telescope discovered a new planet called Uranus. The data also suggested that the Milky Way might in fact be a flat disc of stars in which the Sun was embedded. This information was putting the significance of Earth even farther from the original Ptolemaic theory. Then in the 1920's Harlow Shapley and Jan Oort put the final indignation to the Earth centered theory, by saying that we lived in a fairly typical galaxy amongst hundreds of millions of other. Albert Einstein in the early 1900's developed the theory of relativity, that put the Earth in a position in space and time that would have been unthinkable to early civilizations.