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- In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. It is a mathematical concept used to refer to all points of space and time and their relation to each other.
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In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. It is a mathematical concept used to refer to all points of space and time and their relation to each other. Historically, space and time were thought of as separate entities.
Relevant mathematics. Physics portal. Category. v. t. e. In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional (measurement)|continuum]].
- A Simple Ultimate Theory?
- The Data Structure of The Universe
- Space as A Network
- Maybe There’S Nothing But Space
- What Is time?
- Evolving The Network
- Deriving Special Relativity
- Deriving General Relativity
- Particles, Quantum Mechanics, etc.
- Searching For The Universe
In the abstract it’s far from obviousthat there should be a simple, ultimate theory of our universe. Indeed, the history of physics so far might make us doubtful—because it seems as if whenever we learn more, things just get more complicated, at least in terms of the mathematical structures they involve. But—as noted, for example, by early theologi...
But what would such a program be like? One thing is clear: if the program is really going to be extremely simple, it’ll be too small to explicitly encode obvious features of our actual universe, like particle masses, or gauge symmetries, or even the number of dimensions of space. Somehow all these things have to emerge from something much lower lev...
So could this be what space is made of? In traditional physics—and General Relativity—one doesn’t think of space as being “made of” anything. One just thinks of space as a mathematical construct that serves as a kind of backdrop, in which there’s a continuous range of possible positions at which things can be placed. But do we in fact know that spa...
But, OK, if space is a network, what about all the stuff that’s in space? What about all the electrons, and quarks and photons, and so on? In the usual formulation of physics, space is a backdrop, on top of which all the particles, or strings, or whatever, exist. But that gets pretty complicated. And there’s a simpler possibility: maybe in some sen...
Back in the 1800s, there was space and there was time. Both were described by coordinates, and in some mathematical formalisms, both appeared in related ways. But there was no notion that space and time were in any sense “the same thing”. But then along came Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity—and people started talking about “spacetime”, in wh...
OK, so let’s say that underneath space there’s a network. How does this network evolve? A simple hypothesis is to assume that there’s some kind of local rule, which says, in effect that if you see a piece of network that looks like this, replace it with one that looks like that. But now things get a bit complicated. Because there might be lots of p...
So what about spacetime and Special Relativity? Here, as I figured out in the mid-1990s, something excitinghappens: as soon as there’s causal invariance, it basically follows that there’ll be Special Relativity on a large scale. In other words, even though at the lowest level space and time are completely different kinds of things, on a larger scal...
OK, so one can derive Special Relativity from simple models based on networks. What about General Relativity—which, after all, is what we’re celebrating today? Here the news is very good too: subject to various assumptions, I managed in the late 1990s to derive Einstein’s Equationsfrom the dynamics of networks. The whole story is somewhat complicat...
It’s wonderful to be able to derive General Relativity. But that’s not all of physics. Another very important part is quantum mechanics. It’s going to get me too far afield to talk about this in detail here, but presumably particles—like electrons or quarks or Higgs bosons—must exist as certain special regions in the network. In qualitative terms, ...
OK, so it’s conceivable that some network-based model might be able to reproduce things from current physics. How might we set about finding such a model that actually reproduces our exact universe? The traditional instinct would be to start from existing physics, and try to reverse engineer rules that could reproduce it. But is that the only way? ...
In mathematics, a space is a set (sometimes known as a universe) with a definition of relationships among the elements of the set. While modern mathematics uses many types of spaces, such as Euclidean spaces, linear spaces, topological spaces, Hilbert spaces, or probability spaces, it does not define the notion of "space" itself.
In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it. Thus, a line has a dimension of one (1D) because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on it – for example, the point at 5 on a number line.
Jun 1, 2018 · The Sciences. People have always taken space for granted. It is just emptiness, after all—a backdrop to everything else. Time, likewise, simply ticks on incessantly. But if physicists have ...
May 16, 2024 · Space-time, in physical science, single concept that recognizes the union of space and time, first proposed by the mathematician Hermann Minkowski in 1908 as a way to reformulate Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905). Learn more about space-time in this article.
