What is space?

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Feb 4: What is space?

Cosmology
We generally think of space as a vacuum consisting of "nothing".

Yet we know that space has properties.

Space (a component of space-time)3: 

  • expands (at an accelerating rate), diluting matter & radiation4;
  • is warped by massive bodies;
  • can be rippled by catastrophic gravitational events1
  • has a temperature (which is cooling);
  • has intrinsic vacuum energy;
  • creates particle pairs out of "nothing";
  • is intimately linked with time;
  • stretches (redshifts) light wavelength as it expands; and
  • possesses a constant universal speed limit which only electromagnetic waves and massless particles can equal and which only the expansion of space itself may exceed.2

If space has properties like these; and if it can be described by cosmologists in mathematical terms, then it is clearly not what we used to think of as "nothing"; and I have a growing tendency to think that it must be "something".

So what is it? 

Can Cosmologists describe what space is, in laymen's terms?   

1 added 9th April 2014 . Confirmed by Ligo first detection of gravity waves. Predicted 1916 by Einstein, detected 14th September 2015, announced by Ligo 11th February 2016.

2 amended 9th April 2014. 

3 amended 31st December 2016. 

4 amended 5th August 2017. 

Posted by roger in Cosmology

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