The Bizarreness of Space-Time

I am not a fan of the concept of space-time, which will not surprise regular readers of this blog. Much of Einstein’s work is now coming into doubt for various and sundry reasons. And space-time is one concept I would love to see being done away with.

Okay, where to start? Let us start with the concept of space. Concepts about space were initially centered on locations. Primitive people wanted to know where to find drinkable water, prey to hunt, etc. Communications probably focused on paths, basically where to put your feet on a journey. (Some argue that tracking signs on those paths led to the development of language and possibly consciousness.) This was there, that was over there, a warm place in winter was far, far away that way, etc.

As we became more intellectual we characterized space with organizing schemes with directions, units of distance, directions such as “keep the Sun at your back,” and “head toward that mountain,” etc. Math students are familiar with the Cartesian coordinate system, a framework for mapping three dimensional space. We also have the system of latitude and longitude to grid out locations on the surface of the earth. All such systems, however, have to be pegged down somehow. We have the prime meridian, for example, and the equator, and the north and south poles all of which are arbitrarily placed. Even the Cartesian coordinate system has an origin, which must be placed in a fixed position with the three axes then placed into fixed orientations to be able to be used to locate things.

I think you can see that space is not a thing. It has no grounding in nature. Sure we can talk about how we need to add onto our houses because we “need more space,” or Hitler went to war so as to have control over lebensraum, basically space in which Germans could live and grow crops, etc. talking about space as if it were a real thing, but it is not.

So, when Einstein embraced the idea that space could expand it was basically bizarre to most of the other physicists at the time. It was not without some logic. Gravity, unlike all of the other forces in nature, didn’t seem to have a medium and also seemed to act instantaneously. Having objects that move by moving along distorted lines of space solved a number of problems, but created an even greater number (most of which have been swept under various rugs).

How is it that masses (not volumes) of matter can distort space, warp it in fact? If a moving asteroid approaches Earth it follows the “grid” of distorted space-time, and follows a curved path toward the Earth as if the Earth were attracting it. But why do such objects always follow those grid lines down, rather than away from the masses causing the distortion? This “gravity is due to spatial distortion” idea is incomplete.

And then we have time, something we still struggle to define. Basically it was a measure of duration. We say things like “I was sick for three days.” That gives your listener an idea of how long you suffered. But is time a “thing?” Can it be expanded or contracted? Subjectively we feel time is quite capricious in how it seems to pass in our experience. But instruments we have devised to track durations, clocks, watches, etc., seem to tick along consistently showing no such variations. It seems like time can be subjective or objective.

But is time a dimension? The definition of the term dimension includes “a measurable extent of some kind, such as length, breadth, depth, or height.” So, time can be considered to be a dimension and we often create graphs showing how things change over time. But this is merely for our convenience and edification, it does not establish that the dimension of time is a physical thing, certainly not one that can expand or contract.

And the creation of space-time? The three spatial dimensions are linked together through the simple fact that all physical objects are three dimensional, Guy Fieri’s joke about “meat sliced so thin it only has one side” aside. But time is a measure of duration and this might be linked to an object (like a rain drop that evaporates) but linked to other non-time dimensions? On what basis? Is there a ratio linking the two, e.g. how many parts of space are equivalent to one part of time, etc.

So, space (not a thing) is linked to time (not a thing) and it is expanding because . . . because. . . .

People are not told inconvenient details, for example according to current theory space-time is expanding, but only between the galaxies, not within them. Then the explanation of “expanding space-time” does not include a reason for this being even possible, possibly due to a reliance on the General Theory of Relativity of Einstein being a largely mathematical construct and not a conceptual one. Other theories do account for this but those theories are “out of fashion,” I guess would be the term.

And the BBT theory is linked to a particular aspect of GRT, that being that space is inherently “empty.” Photons of light are traveling to us though empty space and since they are red-shifted, their wavelengths must be lengthening because space-time is stretching. No explanation is given why objects in space would be stretched as space containing them was being stretched, of course.

There is more than one fly in this ointment. For example, the physics community was convinced BE (before Einstein) that space wasn’t empty, that it was filled by what was called the “luminiferous aether” or just aether for short. The existence of this was hypothesized as being the medium through which light traveled through otherwise empty space.

There was an experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, which was an attempt to measure the motion of the Earth through that aether and it came up with a near null result and so some concluded from that that the aether didn’t exist, but that is not what that experiment showed. This was one of those situations in which scientists get their exercise by jumping to conclusions. All kinds of interpretations were possible and eventually experiments done at different altitudes produced different results, thus supporting the existence of an aether. Also, a simple reason that the M-M experiment got near null results is that the Earth might be dragging the aether along with it as it rotated in space and revolved around the Sun. After all the Earth drags its atmosphere around with it.

If there is indeed an aether, then the light from distant galaxies would not be traveling through a vacuum but through a medium and light always loses energy when traveling through a medium. Since it cannot slow down, the loss of energy would show up as a frequency shift downward/wavelength shift upward (toward the red end of the spectrum). And the longer it traveled, the more energy it would lose and the more red-shifted it would become.

Oh, and by the way, later in his career, Einstein switched back to the position that there was an aether after all, even though it made quite some bits of this theories obsolete.

Books have been written explaining physics with an aether included. Studies are still being done. More than a few of the weirdnesses of modern physics get explained very simply through these alternative theories without getting into theoretical dead ends like dark energy, dark matter, cosmic inflation. But because they are “out of fashion” the best minds aren’t focused upon them, which we really would need to create better progress.

Stay tuned.