What is Space?

Always worthwhile watching, if you're talking about spacetime (and even if you're not)...

Nima gives an interesting and enjoyable talk at SLAC, about why spacetime seems to be doomed...

Spacetime and quantum mechanics are the pillars of our modern understanding of fundamental physics. But there are storm clouds on the horizon indicating that these principles are approximate, and must be replaced with something deeper. The union of quantum mechanics and gravity strongly suggests that spacetime as a basic concept is doomed, and there are related indications of fundamental limitations to quantum mechanics in both the early and late universe. In this talk I review these paradoxes and describe indications for a new picture where spacetime and quantum mechanics will be seen to emerge hand in hand from more primitive principles, making contact with new areas of mathematics. I give concrete examples of how these ideas work in the context of scattering amplitudes, describing particle collision experiments of the sort performed at the Large Hadron Collider.

. We take it for granted that space is mostly a vacuum and that it offers zero resistance to objects moving through it. So how does it have contours which can be distorted my those massive objects? What gets distorted? If space is nothingness, surely it doesn't make sense that it can be distorted? Or am I missing something?

These are some of the most difficult questions for science to measure and model.

Space turns out not to be nothingness, except in abstract versions of reality, such as ideas from Euclidean geometry.  How can we measure nothingness?  The answer is we can do it pretty well.  This is not new in physics.  Better DOE (designs of experiments) increase the scope of data and trend toward better working ideas about what is happening.

https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-...othingness

 
This time, instead of looking at the changes in quantum fluctuations by absorbing and amplifying photons of light, the team studied light on the time domain.

That sounds weird, but in a vacuum, space and time behave in the same way, so it's possible to examine one to learn more about the other.

Doing this, the team saw that when they 'squeezed' the vacuum, it worked kind of like squeezing a balloon, and redistributed the strange quantum fluctuations within it.

The idea here is that what is previously thought as immaterial probabilities, turn out to be "substance".  And -- for me at least -- these substances have patterns and rules for their structure.  The substance comes from information structures.  They are there as the ontological nature of the informational environment.  The discovery of the quantum wave function as an abstract tool - works because the "time/space independent" environment of informational activity is just as real as the manifest here and now.  There are real-world probabilities evolving - connected with the manifest physical - but evolving different patterns.   The patterns of of quantum science work becuase they reflect something real about the informational environment.

I have always asked myself the same question.  Maybe information science can answer.  I'm just waiting for @stephenw  to see this.  I suspect that reality is an information field rather than nothing with stuff in it.

 For me, the shapes in the nothingness are the interacting probability waves.  They are physically nothing.  Out of the nothingness emerges the future.  

In this model of nothingness of physicality and an informational field, before there was the big-bang --- there is evolving probabilities of its emergence.  The activity driving the substantial probabilities is not physical, it is active information.

Maybe mind, or something like it, are there making things happen.

Remember how we measure mind!  The action of mind is to change these real-world-probabilities.

Test taking in measuring intelligence, is only the use of mind to recognize correct probabilities based on reason.