A Briefer History of Time Part I

I am currently reading a Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking. He explains the early ideas about space and the universe, and one old woman thought that the Earth was a flat plate supsended in the air by an ininite tower of turtles. Now we think that that idea is completely absurd, but had we lived in that time we would not have been able to come up with a better answer. Once society had come to the conclusion that Earth was a sphere rotating in an orbit around the Sun in our lovely little solar system, surrounded by countless other galaxies in our vast universe, things became much clearer for everyone. Newton came along and gave us his theories on motion and gravity, which we all know by heart. Even with Newton's laws certain things were not explained and he had flaws in his logic. Einstein created his theories of special and general relativity, stating that both time and space are NOT absolute, as it was believed to be before. His theories also upheld certain factors, like Mercury's orbit, which could not be explained with Newton's laws.