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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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Mathematically, spacetime is a manifold, which is to say, it appears locally "flat" near each point in the same way that, at small enough scales, the surface of a globe appears flat. [7] A scale factor, (conventionally called the speed-of-light) relates distances measured in space with distances measured in time.
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.
- 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? ...
Aug 15, 2014 · Space-time. A term denoting a geometric structure that describes the spatial and temporal relations in those physical theories in which these relations are considered as interdependent (these theories are usually called relativistic).
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).
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
A given point $ (x,y,z,t)$ in space-time is called an event. Imagine, for example, that we plot the $x$-positions horizontally, $y$ and $z$ in two other directions, both mutually at “right angles” and at “right angles” to the paper (!), and time, vertically.
Jun 1, 2018 · What Is Spacetime? Physicists believe that at the tiniest scales, space emerges from quanta. What might these building blocks look like? By George Musser. Chris Gash. June 2018 Issue. The...
