Reference: Postulate Mechanics
Everything around you — rocks, sunlight, and even your own thoughts — is made of something. Scientists call it substance. And all substance shares five special properties. Think of them like superpowers that everything has.
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1. Space — How Much Room Things Take Up
Everything takes up space. A rock takes up a tiny, squished amount of space. Light spreads out over a huge amount of space. And your thoughts? They take up space too, but it’s a different kind — it’s mental space inside your mind.
Here’s something cool: there’s no such thing as truly empty space. Even a room with no furniture still has light and air in it. Space always has something in it.
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2. Time — How Long Things Last
Time is how long something sticks around. A mountain lasts millions of years — it has a lot of time. A flash of light zips by super fast — it has much less time. Your thoughts? Sometimes a minute feels like forever (like waiting for summer vacation), and sometimes an hour feels like five minutes (like playing video games). That’s mental time!
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3. Inertia — How Stubborn Things Are
Inertia means things don’t like to change. A bowling ball sitting still doesn’t want to move. Once you push it, it doesn’t want to stop. That stubbornness is inertia.
A spinning top is a great example. It stays upright because it’s spinning — it’s “centered.” Rocks and heavy things have lots of inertia. Light has very little. Thoughts can be stubborn too (ever tried to stop thinking about something?) or they can flow freely.
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4. Motion — How Much Things Move Around
Motion is how much something naturally moves. Rocks and mountains barely move at all. Light zooms at 186,000 miles every second — that’s insanely fast. Thoughts can jump from one idea to another almost instantly.
Here’s the interesting part: inertia actually keeps things moving the same way. It’s what keeps light going at the same speed all the time.
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5. Gravity — The Balancing Act of the Universe
Gravity is like inertia, but for a whole group of things working together. Think about the solar system: the sun, Earth, Mars, and all the planets are moving in a giant, balanced dance. Gravity keeps that dance going. If something bumps into the dance, gravity tries to fix it and bring everything back to balance.
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Why Does This Matter?
Most science books treat space and time as if they exist on their own, floating out there in the universe. But this book says: no substance = no space, no time, no inertia, no motion, no gravity. They only exist because things exist.
Science also usually thinks of inertia as just “stubbornness.” But here, inertia is seen as something deeper — it’s what gives everything its natural rhythm of movement, and gravity does the same thing for whole systems of objects like solar systems.
It’s a new way of looking at the universe — from the inside out.
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