(Mar 22, 2018 05:33 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Is Space a Concept?
I guess that I'd say 'yes'.
Quote:Space as far as I can tell is nothingness, a void. Yep I know matter currently resides in this emptiness.
Difficulties arise because the vocabulary that we use to discuss these things isn't used systematically and people often mean different things when they use the same word. Here's a variety of things that people seem to often be talking about:
1. Space as a mathematical abstraction. It consists of and is defined by abstract geometrical and relational properties that Euclid and subsequent geometry has sought to explore, down to Einstein. It seems kind of ideal and Platonic to me.
2. Void as the absence of tangible solid matter. A hole inside a material object is a void. Outer space approximates a void.
3. Vacuum as a kind of metaphysical stuff. (It would seem to be the primary stuff of the universe itself, with little bits of solid matter scattered here and there in it.) It certainly seems to have some kind of physical reality -- the principles of quantum mechanics continue to apply to vacuums which can have physical properties such as playing host to fields of various kinds, giving rise physical events such as quantum mechanical virtual particle creation etc. Some physical theories seem to consider the fundamental particles of matter to be various kinds of excitations of the underlying vacuum. Geometrical properties seem to apply to the physical vacuum as well, in ways that seem dependent on motion and gravity and stuff like that. But things like Minkowski space (the space of special relativity) do seem to me to be conceptual constructs (space in the abstract sense up above) that we can apply with some satisfactory degree of isomorphism to our observations the actual geometrical properties of the physical vacuum.
4. And ultimately, non-existence as something far more profound. This one is the non-existence of
everything, including geometrical properties, empty black voids and physical vacuum and its properties. It's the absence of anything about which one might ask, 'why does anything like that exist?'
I personally think that a great deal of confusion arises from confusing ideas like these. So we are treated to all the "something-from-nothing" speculations so popular among a certain kind of physicist these days. They try to derive the physical universe from some quantum event that supposedly happened in a physical vacuum and then strut around acting like they've solved the ancient metaphysical question of why existence exists at all. That seems to me to confuse physical vacuum with non-existence.
Mar 24, 2018 12:28 AM
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