Alan Guth — American Physicist born on February 27, 1947,

Alan Harvey Guth is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist. Guth has researched elementary particle theory (and how particle theory is applicable to the early universe). He is currently serving as Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with Alexei Starobinsky and Andrei Linde, he won the 2014 Kavli Prize “for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation.”.. (wikipedia)

When one studies the properties of atoms, one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction. Particles really do have the possibility of, in some sense, being in more than one place at one time.
Our best theory of describing space at a fundamental level is probably string theory.
Now, what space ultimately is - I should confess, I think most physicists believe - we don't yet know.
Space is certainly something more complicated than the average person would probably realize. Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.
In the context of general relativity, space almost is a substance. It can bend and twist and stretch, and probably the best way to think about space is to just kind of imagine a big piece of rubber that you can pull and twist and bend.