  Einstein’s intended his theory to replace Newton’s theory of gravitation completely. In Einstein’s view, gravity was not a force existing independently of the spatial ‘container’; rather, gravitation arises as a curvature of the space (and time, which is necessarily connected to space in the new theory), which means that geometry and gravity and astronomical behavior are all intimately connected. For example, near the sun the geometrical structure, the curvature, of spacetime changes radically, which expresses itself as an increasing velocity of incoming orbiting bodies such as comets or satellites. One immediate, and to some, puzzling, consequence of Einstein’s theory is that the geometry of the Universe is no longer taken to be Euclidean. Although there are several different candidates for the actual geometry of space, it was not known which is correct.