Thomas Gold — Austrian Scientist born on May 22, 1920, died on June 22, 2004

Thomas Gold was an Austrian-born astrophysicist, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Gold was one of three young Cambridge scientists who in the 1950s proposed the now mostly abandoned 'steady state' hypothesis of the universe. Gold's work crossed academic and scientific boundaries, into biophysics, astronomy, aerospace engineering, and geophysics... (wikipedia)

I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is, so that you could see whether the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two sides. In this case it certainly wasn't.
In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid. I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age.