What Is Space? - Issue 49: The Absurd

Ask a group of physicists and philosophers to define "space" and you will likely be stuck in a long discussion that involves deep-sounding but 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. Is space just an infinite emptiness that underlies everything? Or is it the emptiness between things? What if space is neither of these but is a physical thing that can slosh around, like a bathtub full of water? It turns out that the nature of space itself is one of the biggest and strangest mysteries in the universe. So get ready, because things are about to get ... spacey. Like many deep questions, the question of what space is sounds like a simple one at first. But if you challenge your intuition and reexamine 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. In this view, space is literally the lack of stuff.