Empty Empty Space
So what if empty space had no energy, no stars, no atoms, no anything? What would it be? In General Relativity we assume it is a mathematical set of points called a Reimannian manifold. There are tons of other possibilities. See https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/space, for a view of space from Category Theory. In Quantum Theory it is thought that space is “grainy” at extremely small scales; that space is “quantized” in some way. Here we will not talk about mathematical spaces, but space’s relationship to matter and energy. I argue that Mach’s principle is valid, and that space relies upon matter for its existence. This, even though, there are mathematical examples of spaces that solve the right equations, but are empty of matter everywhere. I argue that those examples are invalid.
Light and the Lumeniferous Aether
Yes, that’s what they called it in the olden days, the Lumeniferous Aether. In other words the “light-bearing ether”. It was a hypothetical substance that permeated all of space. Light was shown to be a solution to Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism, and that is was an electromagnetic wave. All other known waves travel through some medium: water waves through water, sound waves through the air, seismic waves through the ground, etc. So, for a wave to travel, a disturbance in one place affects the neighboring place, and so on, as the wave propagates. How can this be in empty space? Well a very famous experiment, the Michelson-Morely experiment, showed there was no ether. Light then travels through the vacuum of empty space. This is an extremely important fact that, in some sense, is the basis of my ideas presented in the paper which can be found at the link above. This kind of means that nothing is not quite nothing. In fact, I show that matter and space are composed of the same “stuff”. Matter is just where the “stuff” is denser. Think of an ice cube in a container filled with water vapor. It looks like an object in an empty space, but everything is actually water.
So, just about everything is nothing. But that nothing is filled with energy. So there’s nothing but empty space, but empty space is far from nothing.
My paper, found here, details a revolutionary new theory of the physics of all this.