Look, I've come here for a serious conversation. I believe I can further our knowledge of the universe. But you have to actually exercise your brilliant intelligence.

If we are to keep it simple and just think about the origin of the laws of the universe, it would be obvious to you that they must originate in spacetime; that's the only possible location they could be.

3 minutes ago, PrimalMinister said:

Look, I've come here for a serious conversation. I believe I can further our knowledge of the universe. But you have to actually exercise your brilliant intelligence.

If we are to keep it simple and just think about the origin of the laws of the universe, it would be obvious to you that they must originate in spacetime; that's the only possible location they could be.

I wouldn't do this if I were you. They don't like people restarting closed topics here.

We can perhaps continue to debate the distinction between science and metaphysics in the Philosophy section, if you like, but your polymorphic whatevers are done, I suspect.

Edited August 27Aug 27 by exchemist

We don't have to discuss my theory; we can just discuss the origin of the laws. If you actually think about it, they must originate in space; that's the only possible location they could be. Where else are they going to originate?

I honestly just think you are toying with me for fun while I am here for a serious, important conversation.

Just now, PrimalMinister said:

We don't have to discuss my theory; we can just discuss the origin of the laws. If you actually think about it, they must originate in space; that's the only possible location they could be. Where else are they going to originate?

Well I agree it is all a bit mysterious why the order is the way it is and why the various fundamental constants have the values they do. Why does the speed of light have the value it does, or equivalently, why should the dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability of the vacuum take the values they do? Ditto the fine structure constant. And so on. There is a school of thought that attributes this to the Anthropic Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Personally I'm not a huge fan of it but it's not a silly idea.

But I don't see why this kind of intrinsic order in the cosmos has to be located in space, exactly and I'm not sure what it means to state that it is. It's a property of the cosmos, certainly.

Edited August 27Aug 27 by exchemist

What is space exactly, according to the current theories?

1 hour ago, PrimalMinister said:

What is space exactly, according to the current theories?

Well that's a really good question and I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer. It certainly seems to have some properties, so it's not just a total absence of anything.

Apart from its electromagnetic properties connected to the speed of light, it also, according to QFT, has zero point energy. It can, in places, possess, or be permeated by, fields of various kinds. It can, according to GR, possess non-trivial mathematical properties too. But at the same time it is not material. I believe Einstein at one point said it could be thought of as a kind of aether (there were aether theories around not long before he did his work on relativity) though he was keen to stress not of a material kind.

I'm tempted to say it just is what it is, or better, it seems to be what it seems to be. And on that basis we just get on with it. Perhaps a bit like the "shut up and calculate" school of interpretation of quantum mechanics. Again, there are here more questions to which science doesn't really have an answer.

Perhaps the real philosophical point here is that the job of science is to construct models of the physical world which enable us to predict how it will behave. In the poplar imagination, science tells us all what physical reality actually is. But in fact its aims are more modest: to model physical reality without claiming to have the whole truth about it. This is very clear in my own discipline, chemistry, in which because we deal with messily complex systems (atoms with lots of electrons, molecules with lots of atoms and so on), we often have more than one model for the same thing. We choose the model appropriate to the task, knowing that all the models are only approximations to the real situation. It is also clear from the history of science that one model may be superseded in time by another. We have no way of knowing whether or when the last of the Russian dolls may have been opened.

19 hours ago, PrimalMinister said:

I honestly just think you are toying with me for fun while I am here for a serious, important conversation.

And that's what it seems like when you don't understand what people are trying to tell you. You don't seem to have studied much before leaping to guesswork and making stuff up that seems more intuitive to you. I know because you've said this:

19 hours ago, PrimalMinister said:

What is space exactly, according to the current theories?

It's like you're toying with us for fun, trying to overthrow some bit of science without understanding it or even bothering to look it up for yourself. I don't think discussion with you will be meaningful for anybody,

20 hours ago, PrimalMinister said:

If we are to keep it simple and just think about the origin of the laws of the universe, it would be obvious to you that they must originate in spacetime; that's the only possible location they could be.

You’re reifying these laws. That’s an assumption. What’s the evidence that the laws of the universe exist as some kind of tangible entity?

21 hours ago, PrimalMinister said:

What is space exactly, according to the current theories?

Space is a 'concept' to which we apply an ever changing ( as our understanding of its properties increases ) definition to.

Bold move, re-opening a closed thread.
I hope you bring more to the table this time around, or it will quickly follow the same fate.

Dirac once suggested that the laws are essentially the same, but the category we understand to be "universal constants of physics" evolve with cosmological time.

The idea of a multiverse suggests the different values for the constants of physics are a consquence of local phase transitions in wide ranges of the universe.

Other people have suggested the existence of some (one would think unfathomable) meta-laws of physics for which the present laws are a transient phase.

I know Smolin and collaborators have been working on some kind of analog of Darwinian evolution for the laws of physics.

The very fact that there are so many ideas in that direction and apparently nobody has been able to formulate a precise way to propose an experiment to test them, to me speaks of a domain of undecidability or non-falsifiability.

Bold move, re-opening a closed thread.

To be clear, since the OP has said we are not discussing their conjecture, it’s not a re-opening. I’ve moved this to philosophy, since it’s on the nature of the universe.

2 hours ago, joigus said:

Dirac once suggested that the laws are essentially the same, but the category we understand to be "universal constants of physics" evolve with cosmological time.

The idea of a multiverse suggests the different values for the constants of physics are a consquence of local phase transitions in wide ranges of the universe.

Other people have suggested the existence of some (one would think unfathomable) meta-laws of physics for which the present laws are a transient phase.

I know Smolin and collaborators have been working on some kind of analog of Darwinian evolution for the laws of physics.

The very fact that there are so many ideas in that direction and apparently nobody has been able to formulate a precise way to propose an experiment to test them, to me speaks of a domain of undecidability or non-falsifiability.

Yes this is intriguing but, being untestable it's metaphysics rather than science.

I think the issue of what space - or the vacuum- "is", is however far from trivial and quite hard to answer, as it does seem to have evolved considerably as physics has developed.

Would the zero point energy not be the 'substance' of space when a volume is analysed down to its most basic component... under scientists present understanding? I mean substance in the sense of some phenomenon pervading throughout the volume.

Edited August 28Aug 28 by StringJunky

2 hours ago, exchemist said:

I think the issue of what space - or the vacuum- "is", is however far from trivial and quite hard to answer, as it does seem to have evolved considerably as physics has developed.

I agree in principle, but I think it is even more complicated than that.

Here is an analogous but much easier question.

What is curry ?

Well there are as many answers to this as there are chefs.

6 hours ago, studiot said:

I agree in principle, but I think it is even more complicated than that.

Here is an analogous but much easier question.

What is curry ?

Well there are as many answers to this as there are chefs.

Since we are talking physics in which a degree of precision in terms is required, rather than our vague British notions of Indian cuisine, I suggest a fairer comparison would be to ask “what is an electron?” I suspect you and I could produce a fairly credible and concise answer to that. But space? Rather harder.

Edited August 29Aug 29 by exchemist

12 hours ago, exchemist said:

Yes this is intriguing but, being untestable it's metaphysics rather than science.

I think the issue of what space - or the vacuum- "is", is however far from trivial and quite hard to answer, as it does seem to have evolved considerably as physics has developed.

There could be faint hopes of some day testing with gravitational waves and such. This is because GW can probe farther and earlier than any other signal.

10 hours ago, StringJunky said:

Would the zero point energy not be the 'substance' of space when a volume is analysed down to its most basic component... under scientists present understanding? I mean substance in the sense of some phenomenon pervading throughout the volume.

Maybe. But at this point I think the situation is better illustrated by a professor's famous words "think of this as..."

In the same spirit, I tend to see space as a property of both curry and electrons, not so much as a thing of itself.

11 minutes ago, joigus said:

Maybe. But at this point I think the situation is better illustrated by a professor's famous words "think of this as..."

In the same spirit, I tend to see space as a property of both curry and electrons, not so much as a thing of itself.

I can go with that. Basically, in the absence of anything there is no space. Something has to exist in order for space to also exist. In the same sense that if there is no object to measure it's dimensions, then length doesn't.

3 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Basically, in the absence of anything there is no space. Something has to exist in order for space to also exist.

That's a good way to put it, I thnk. The interesting point, at the risk of getting silly is, provided there is something (electrons, curry,...), why is it 3D? (Or 3+1, including time).

Maybe 10 years in the future someone can think of a consistent way of looking at spacial dimension as an observable that can be assigned probabilities in the proper generalisation of quantum mechanics (with testable consequences). And for some reason, we are bound to live in an eigenstate of that observable with D=3.

I see my curry hasn't gained much flavour favour.

😄

Pity since no one seems to have caught my analogy.

Physicists and Mathematicians have very different definitions.

There are, in fact, many different spaces some and material some abstract.

So it make sense to qualify the word with additional phraseology to convey the particular description the users wishes to employ.

Mordred used to say space is just volume.

I like to think I can distill the essence of the idea as a container and separator.

Does anyone disagree that the white space on your screen or page is real ?

Edited August 29Aug 29 by studiot

10 minutes ago, studiot said:

I see my curry hasn't gained much flavour favour.

😄

Pity since no one seems to have caught my analogy.

Physicists and Mathematicians have very different definitions.

There are, in fact, many different spaces some and material some abstract.

So it make sense to qualify the word with additional phraseology to convey the particular description the users wishes to employ.

Mordred used to say space is just volume.

I like to think I can distill the essence of the idea as a container and separator.

Does anyone disagree that the white space on your screen or page is real ?

Yes but my point is space seems not to be just volume. It has measurable physical properties and even energy. It is not just mathematical, it is physical.

14 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Yes but my point is space seems not to be just volume. It has measurable physical properties and even energy. It is not just mathematical, it is physical.

What I am saying with the curry and the chef is that space needs to have the qualities /characteristics/properties the users requires for his needs.

But some other user may have different requirements and so will have a different meaning for 'space'.

As a relativity specialist, Mordred is OK to choose space as just volume.

My container and separator description allows a user to put things in and take things out of the space and not forgetting the separator function, do this in the right order or configuration at the right time.

On 8/27/2025 at 7:32 PM, PrimalMinister said:

What is space exactly, according to the current theories?

This is an interesting hypothesis.

Universe emerged from time, not from space? New theory shows how

"It is believed that matter, motion, gravity, and everything else we know of originated from the three dimensions of space and one of time. However, a new idea challenges this theory, suggesting that time, specifically in three dimensions, is the true fabric of the universe, with space emerging as a secondary effect.."

4 minutes ago, studiot said:

What I am saying with the curry and the chef is that space needs to have the qualities /characteristics/properties the users requires for his needs.

But some other user may have different requirements and so will have a different meaning for 'space'.

As a relativity specialist, Mordred is OK to choose space as just volume.

My container and separator description allows a user to put things in and take things out of the space and not forgetting the separator function, do this in the right order or configuration at the right time.

But for relativity you need the speed of light, which has a particular physical value, which in turn implies particular physical values for permittivity and permeability of space. Though those do not matter for relativity calculations of course, only c itself. But the very fact that c is a particular, finite number means space has physical properties.

Edited August 29Aug 29 by exchemist

10 minutes ago, exchemist said:

But for relativity you need the speed of light, which has a particular physical value, which in turn implies particular physical values for permittivity and permeability of space. Though those do not matter for relativity calculations of course, only c itself. But the very fact that c is a particular, finite number means space has physical properties.

No, c applies to a vacuum.

Or are you suggesting that there is no space inside a crystal ?

57 minutes ago, studiot said:

No, c applies to a vacuum.

Or are you suggesting that there is no space inside a crystal ?

Not sure what you mean. Yes, c applies to space, because it is a vacuum.

Inside a crystal you have space but also a lot of electrically charged matter that is polarised by the light, altering its phase velocity.