What is space? | Universe and us (Segment 3)

This is third of the science post from the series “Universe and Us”

In Part-1 and Part-2 we looked how vast our universe is and how small we know about it.

Moving on now let’s debrief some more areas of Universe.

Here we are trying to make you aware about the most used terminology space, what does space actually means?

Even if we grasp for answers to questions about the tangible things surrounding us, there is a great mystery hanging out in the background. That mystery is the background itself called space.

What is space, anyway?

Ask a group of physicists and philosophers to define “space” and you will likely be stuck in a long discussion that involves meaningless word combinations such as “the very fabric of space-time itself is a physical manifestation of quantum entropy concepts woven together by the universal nature of location.”

On second thought, maybe you should avoid starting deep conversations between philosophers and physicists.

Like many deep questions, the question of what space is sounds like a simple one at first. But if you challenge your intuition and re-examine the question, you discover that a clear answer is hard to find.

Most people imagine that space is just the emptiness in which things happen, like a big empty warehouse or a theater stage on which the events of the universe play out.

Space is definitely not an empty void and it is definitely not just a relationship between matter. We know this because we have seen space do things that fit neither of those ideas. We have observed space bend and ripple and expand.

But wait if space is an idea, then it can’t be bent or expanded.

If space is our ruler for measuring the location of stuff, how do you measure the bending or expanding of space?

Good questions! The reason this idea of space bending is so confusing is that most of us grow up with a mental picture of space as an invisible backdrop in which things happen, but to make sense of general relativity and think about modern ideas of space, you have to give up the idea of space as an abstract stage and accept that it is a physical thing.

You have to imagine that space has properties and behaviors, and that it reacts to the matter in the universe. You can pinch space and you can also squeeze it.

Observations make it pretty clear that the distance between objects in space is not measured on an invisible abstract backdrop but depends on the properties of the space.

Perhaps maybe what we call space is actually sitting inside some larger “superspace.”And perhaps that superspace is like an infinite emptiness, but we have no idea.

In order to understand what space is and what it can do, our best shot is looking carefully at places where cosmically huge masses are squeezing and straining it (black holes). If we could explore near black holes, we might see space shredded and chopped.

Perhaps in the near future we will understand more about the exact nature of space and get at these deep questions that are literally all around us. So don’t space out. And save some space in your brain for the answers.

With this we conclude our third post from the series “Universe and Us”. If you want to explore more, check out the science label section for more web logs.

Citations: We extend our gratitude towards two persons “Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson”, for their book “We have no Idea” without which these entries wouldn’t be possible”