Space (Wikipedia) (old)

Reference: Disturbance Theory

Parts from Wikipedia article are quoted in black. My comments follow in bold color italics.

Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum known as spacetime. The concept of space is considered to be of fundamental importance to an understanding of the physical universe. However, disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework.

The above is an incomplete definition of space. This word “boundless” makes it a mathematical abstraction. Real space always describes the dimensional extent of something. If that something is not identified, then you do not have a complete description of space.

Our sense of space comes from the dimension of material objects. We assume space to be as rigid as these objects, but that doesn’t seem to go with reality. The above paragraph seems to admit to this incompleteness of definition.

Debates concerning the nature, essence and the mode of existence of space date back to antiquity; namely, to treatises like the Timaeus of Plato, or Socrates in his reflections on what the Greeks called khôra (i.e. “space”), or in the Physics of Aristotle (Book IV, Delta) in the definition of topos (i.e. place), or in the later “geometrical conception of place” as “space qua extension” in the Discourse on Place (Qawl fi al-Makan) of the 11th-century Arab polymath Alhazen. Many of these classical philosophical questions were discussed in the Renaissance and then reformulated in the 17th century, particularly during the early development of classical mechanics. In Isaac Newton’s view, space was absolute—in the sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there was any matter in the space. Other natural philosophers, notably Gottfried Leibniz, thought instead that space was in fact a collection of relations between objects, given by their distance and direction from one another. In the 18th century, the philosopher and theologian George Berkeley attempted to refute the “visibility of spatial depth” in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. Later, the metaphysician Immanuel Kant said that the concepts of space and time are not empirical ones derived from experiences of the outside world—they are elements of an already given systematic framework that humans possess and use to structure all experiences. Kant referred to the experience of “space” in his Critique of Pure Reason as being a subjective “pure a priori form of intuition”.

The reason the complete definition of space could not be discovered until now is because of the hidden reality of FIELD. The existence of field was not known until it was discovered through extensive experimental observations made of the electromagnetic phenomena by Faraday. The space out there represents the dimensions of field. Field is the fundamental substance that fills the emptiness.

In the 19th and 20th centuries mathematicians began to examine geometries that are non-Euclidean, in which space is conceived as curved, rather than flat. According to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, space around gravitational fields deviates from Euclidean space. Experimental tests of general relativity have confirmed that non-Euclidean geometries provide a better model for the shape of space.

The conceptualization of space has mostly been philosophical and mathematical. Assumptions about space have been slowly discovered over time as in non-Euclidian geometry and general relativity. Now it will take a study of field to get a better understanding of space.

Vinaire's Blog