Space-Time Doesn't Exist - But It's A Useful Framework For Understanding Our Reality

(MENAFN- The Conversation) Whether space-time exists should neither be controversial nor even conceptually challenging, given the definitions of“space-time,”“events” and“instants.” The idea that space-time exists is no more viable than the outdated belief that the celestial sphere exists : both are observer-centred models that are powerful and convenient for describing the world, but neither represents reality itself.

Read more: What, exactly, is space-time?

Yet from the standpoints of modern physics , philosophy , popular science communication and familiar themes in science fiction , stating that space-time does not exist is contentious.

But what would it mean for a world where everything that has ever happened or will happen somehow“exists” now as part of an interwoven fabric?

Events are not locations

It's easy to imagine past events - like losing a tooth or receiving good news - as existing somewhere. Fictional representations of time travel underscore this : time travellers alter events and disrupt the timeline, as if past and future events were locations one could visit with the right technology.

Philosophers often talk this way too. Eternalism says all events across all time exist. The growing block view suggests the past and present exist while the future will come to be. Presentism says only the present exists, while the past used to exist and the future will when it happens. And general relativity presents a four-dimensional continuum that bends and curves - we tend to imagine that continuum of the events as really existing.

The confusion emerges out of the definition of the word“exist.” With space-time, it's applied uncritically to a mathematical description of happenings - turning a model into an ontological theory on the nature of being.

Physical theorist Sean Carroll explains presentism and eternalism. A totality

In physics, space-time is the continuous set of events that happen throughout space and time - from here to the furthest galaxy, from the Big Bang to the far future. It is a four-dimensional map that records and measures where and when everything happens. In physics, an event is an instantaneous occurrence at a specific place and time.

An instant is the three-dimensional collection of spatially separated events that happen“at the same time” (with relativity's usual caveat that simultaneity depends on one's relative state of rest).

Space-time is the totality of all events that ever happen.

It's also our most powerful way of cataloguing the world's happenings. That cataloguing is indispensable, but the words and concepts we use for it matter.

There are infinitely many points in the three dimensions of space, and at every instant as time passes a unique event occurs at each location.

Positionings throughout time

Physicists describe a car travelling straight at constant speed with a simple space-time diagram : position on one axis, time on the other. Instants stack together to form a two-dimensional space-time. The car's position is a point within each instant, and those points join to form a worldline - the full record of the car's position throughout the time interval, whose slope is the car's speed.

Real motion is far more complex. The car rides along on a rotating Earth orbiting the sun, which orbits the Milky Way as it drifts through the local universe. Plotting the car's position at every instant ultimately requires four-dimensional space-time.

Space-time is the map of where and when events happen. A worldline is the record of every event that occurs throughout one's life. The key question is whether the map - or all the events it draws together at once - should be said to exist in the same way that cars, people and the places they go exist.

A car's worldline is its mapping in place over time. (Phạm Nhật/Unsplash+) Objects exist

Consider what“exist” means . Objects, buildings, people, cities, planets, galaxies exist - they are either places or occupy places, enduring there over intervals of time. They persist through changes and can be encountered repeatedly.

Treating occurrences as things that exist smuggles confusion into our language and concepts. When analyzing space-time, do events, instants, worldlines or even space-time as a whole exist in the same sense as places and people? Or is it more accurate to say that events happen in an existing world?

On that view, space-time is the map that records those happenings, allowing us to describe the spatial and temporal relationships between them.

Space-time does not exist

Events do not exist, they happen. Consequently, space-time does not exist. Events happen everywhere throughout the course of existence, and the occurrence of an event is categorically different from the existence of anything - whether object, place or concept.

First, there is no empirical evidence that any past, present or future event“exists” in the way that things in the world around us exist. Verifying the existence of an event as an ongoing object would require something like a time machine to go and observe it now. Even present events cannot be verified as ongoing things that exist.

In contrast, material objects exist. Time-travel paradoxes rest on the false premise that events exist as revisitable locations. Recognizing the categorical difference between occurrence and existence resolves these paradoxes.

Read more: Can we time travel? A theoretical physicist provides some answers

Second, this recognition reframes the philosophy of time . Much debate over the past century has treated events as things that exist . Philosophers then focus on their tense properties: is an event past, present or future? Did this one occur earlier or later than that one?

A stencil interpretation of René Magritte's 1929 painting, 'La Trahison des images,' in which the artist points out that the representation of an object is not the object itself. Commons)

These discussions rely on an assumption that events are existent things that bear these properties. From there, it's a short step to the conclusion that time is unreal or that the passage of time is an illusion, on the identification that the same event can be labelled differently from different standpoints. But the ontological distinction was lost at the start : events don't exist, they happen. Tense and order are features of how happenings relate within an existing world, not properties of existent objects.

Finally, consider relativity. It is a mathematical theory that describes a four-dimensional space-time continuum, and not a theory about a four-dimensional thing that exists - that, in the course of its own existence, bends and warps due to gravity.

Conceptual clarity

Physics can't actually describe space-time itself as something that actually exists, nor can it account for any change it might experience as an existing thing.

Space-time provides a powerful description of how events happen: how they are ordered relative to one another, how sequences of events are measured to unfold and how lengths are measured in different reference frames. If we stop saying that events - and space-time - exist, we recover conceptual clarity without sacrificing a single prediction.

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