The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality Read online

  Space Jam

  Einstein once said that if someone uses words like "red," "hard," or "disappointed," we all basically know what is meant. But as for the word "space," "whose relation with psychological experience is less direct, there exists a far-reaching uncertainty of interpretation." 5 This uncertainty reaches far back: the struggle to come to grips with the meaning of space is an ancient one. Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and many of their followers through the ages wrestled in one way or another with the meaning of "space." Is there a difference between space and matter? Does space have an existence independent of the presence of material objects? Is there such a thing as empty space? Are space and matter mutually exclusive? Is space finite or infinite?

  For millennia, the philosophical parsings of space often arose in tandem with theological inquiries. God, according to some, is omnipresent, an idea that gives space a divine character. This line of reasoning was advanced by Henry More, a seventeenth-century theologian/philosopher who, some think, may have been one of Newton's mentors. 6 He believed that if space were empty it would not exist, but he also argued that this is an irrelevant observation because, even when devoid of material objects, space is filled with spirit, so it is never truly empty. Newton himself took on a version of this idea, allowing space to be filled by "spiritual substance" as well as material substance, but he was careful to add that such spiritual stuff "can be no obstacle to the motion of matter; no more than if nothing were in its way." 7 Absolute space, Newton declared, is the sensorium of God.

  Such philosophical and religious musings on space can be compelling and provocative, yet, as in Einstein's cautionary remark above, they lack a critical sharpness of description. But there is a fundamental and precisely framed question that emerges from such discourse: should we ascribe an independent reality to space, as we do for other, more ordinary material objects like the book you are now holding, or should we think of space as merely a language for describing relationships between ordinary material objects?

  The great German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who was Newton's contemporary, firmly believed that space does not exist in any conventional sense. Talk of space, he claimed, is nothing more than an easy and convenient way of encoding where things are relative to one another. Without the objects in space, Leibniz declared, space itself has no independent meaning or existence. Think of the English alphabet. It provides an order for twenty-six letters—it provides relations such as a is next to b, d is six letters before j, x is three letters after u, and so on. But without the letters, the alphabet has no meaning—it has no "supra-letter," independent existence. Instead, the alphabet comes into being with the letters whose lexicographic relations it supplies. Leibniz claimed that the same is true for space: Space has no meaning beyond providing the natural language for discussing the relationship between one object's location and another. According to Leibniz, if all objects were removed from space—if space were completely empty—it would be as meaningless as an alphabet that's missing its letters.

  Leibniz put forward a number of arguments in support of this so-called relationist position. For example, he argued that if space really exists as an entity, as a background substance, God would have had to choose where in this substance to place the universe. But how could God, whose decisions all have sound justification and are never random or haphazard, have possibly distinguished one location in the uniform void of empty space from another, as they are all alike? To the scientifically receptive ear, this argument sounds tinny. However, if we remove the theological element, as Leibniz himself did in other arguments he put forward, we are left with thorny issues: What is the location of the universe within space? If the universe were to move as a whole—leaving all relative positions of material objects intact—ten feet to the left or right, how would we know? What is the speed of the entire universe through the substance of space? If we are fundamentally unable to detect space, or changes within space, how can we claim it actually exists?

  It is here that Newton stepped in with his bucket and dramatically changed the character of the debate. While Newton agreed that certain features of absolute space seem difficult or perhaps impossible to detect directly, he argued that the existence of absolute space does have consequences that are observable: accelerations, such as those at play in the rotating bucket, are accelerations with respect to absolute space. Thus, the concave shape of the water, according to Newton, is a consequence of the existence of absolute space. And Newton argued that once one has any solid evidence for something's existence, no matter how indirect, that ends the discussion. In one clever stroke, Newton shifted the debate about space from philosophical ponderings to scientifically verifiable data. The effect was palpable. In due course, Leibniz was forced to admit, "I grant there is a difference between absolute true motion of a body and a mere relative change of its situation with respect to another body." 8 This was not a capitulation to Newton's absolute space, but it was a strong blow to the firm relationist position.

  During the next two hundred years, the arguments of Leibniz and others against assigning space an independent reality generated hardly an echo in the scientific community. 9 Instead, the pendulum had clearly swung to Newton's view of space; his laws of motion, founded on his concept of absolute space, took center stage. Certainly, the success of these laws in describing observations was the essential reason for their acceptance. It's striking to note, however, that Newton himself viewed all of his achievements in physics as merely forming the solid foundation to support what he considered his really important discovery: absolute space. For Newton, it was all about space. 10

  Mach and the Meaning of Space

  When I was growing up, I used to play a game with my father as we walked down the streets of Manhattan. One of us would look around, secretly fix on something that was happening—a bus rushing by, a pigeon landing on a windowsill, a man accidentally dropping a coin—and describe how it would look from an unusual perspective such as the wheel of the bus, the pigeon in flight, or the quarter falling earthward. The challenge was to take an unfamiliar description like "I'm walking on a dark, cylindrical surface surrounded by low, textured walls, and an unruly bunch of thick white tendrils is descending from the sky," and figure out that it was the view of an ant walking on a hot dog that a street vendor was garnishing with sauerkraut. Although we stopped playing years before I took my first physics course, the game is at least partly to blame for my having a fair amount of distress when I encountered Newton's laws.

  The game encouraged seeing the world from different vantage points and emphasized that each was as valid as any other. But according to Newton, while you are certainly free to contemplate the world from any perspective you choose, the different vantage points are by no means on an equal footing. From the viewpoint of an ant on an ice skater's boot, it is the ice and the arena that are spinning; from the viewpoint of a spectator in the stands, it is the ice skater that is spinning. The two vantage points seem to be equally valid, they seem to be on an equal footing, they seem to stand in the symmetric relationship of each spinning with respect to the other. Yet, according to Newton, one of these perspectives is more right than the other since if it really is the ice skater that is spinning, his or her arms will splay outward, whereas if it really is the arena that is spinning, his or her arms will not. Accepting Newton's absolute space meant accepting an absolute conception of acceleration, and, in particular, accepting an absolute answer regarding who or what is really spinning. I struggled to understand how this could possibly be true. Every source I consulted—textbooks and teachers alike—agreed that only relative motion had relevance when considering constant velocity motion, so why in the world, I endlessly puzzled, would accelerated motion be so different? Why wouldn't relative acceleration, like relative velocity, be the only thing that's relevant when considering motion at velocity that isn't constant? The existence of absolute space decreed otherwise, but to me this seemed thoroughly peculi
ar.

  Much later I learned that over the last few hundred years many physicists and philosophers—sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly—had struggled with the very same issue. Although Newton's bucket seemed to show definitively that absolute space is what selects one perspective over another (if someone or something is spinning with respect to absolute space then they are really spinning; otherwise they are not), this resolution left many people who mull over these issues unsatisfied. Beyond the intuitive sense that no perspective should be "more right" than any other, and beyond the eminently reasonable proposal of Leibniz that only relative motion between material objects has meaning, the concept of absolute space left many wondering how absolute space can allow us to identify true accelerated motion, as with the bucket, while it cannot provide a way to identify true constant velocity motion. After all, if absolute space really exists, it should provide a benchmark for all motion, not just accelerated motion. If absolute space really exists, why doesn't it provide a way of identifying where we are located in an absolute sense, one that need not use our position relative to other material objects as a reference point? And, if absolute space really exists, how come it can affect us (causing our arms to splay if we spin, for example) while we apparently have no way to affect it?

  In the centuries since Newton's work, these questions were sometimes debated, but it wasn't until the mid-1800s, when the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach came on the scene, that a bold, prescient, and extremely influential new view about space was suggested—a view that, among other things, would in due course have a deep impact on Albert Einstein.

  To understand Mach's insight—or, more precisely, one modern reading of ideas often attributed to Mach 2 —let's go back to the bucket for a moment. There is something odd about Newton's argument. The bucket experiment challenges us to explain why the surface of the water is flat in one situation and concave in another. In hunting for explanations, we examined the two situations and realized that the key difference between them was whether or not the water was spinning. Unsurprisingly, we tried to explain the shape of the water's surface by appealing to its state of motion. But here's the thing: before introducing absolute space, Newton focused solely on the bucket as the possible reference for determining the motion of the water and, as we saw, that approach fails. There are other references, however, that we could naturally use to gauge the water's motion, such as the laboratory in which the experiment takes place—its floor, ceiling, and walls. Or if we happened to perform the experiment on a sunny day in an open field, the surrounding buildings or trees, or the ground under our feet, would provide the "stationary" reference to determine whether the water was spinning. And if we happened to perform this experiment while floating in outer space, we would invoke the distant stars as our stationary reference.

  This leads to the following question. Might Newton have kicked the bucket aside with such ease that he skipped too quickly over the relative motion we are apt to invoke in real life, such as between the water and the laboratory, or the water and the earth, or the water and the fixed stars in the sky? Might it be that such relative motion can account for the shape of the water's surface, eliminating the need to introduce the concept of absolute space? That was the line of questioning raised by Mach in the 1870s.

  To understand Mach's point more fully, imagine you're floating in outer space, feeling calm, motionless, and weightless. You look out and you can see the distant stars, and they too appear to be perfectly stationary. (It's a real Zen moment.) Just then, someone floats by, grabs hold of you, and sets you spinning around. You will notice two things. First, your arms and legs will feel pulled from your body and if you let them go they will splay outward. Second, as you gaze out toward the stars, they will no longer appear stationary. Instead, they will seem to be spinning in great circular arcs across the distant heavens. Your experience thus reveals a close association between feeling a force on your body and witnessing motion with respect to the distant stars. Hold this in mind as we try the experiment again but in a different environment.

  Imagine now that you are immersed in the blackness of completely empty space: no stars, no galaxies, no planets, no air, nothing but total blackness. (A real existential moment.) This time, if you start spinning, will you feel it? Will your arms and legs feel pulled outward? Our experiences in day-to-day life lead us to answer yes: any time we change from not spinning (a state in which we feel nothing) to spinning, we feel the difference as our appendages are pulled outward. But the current example is unlike anything any of us has ever experienced. In the universe as we know it, there are always other material objects, either nearby or, at the very least, far away (such as the distant stars), that can serve as a reference for our various states of motion. In this example, however, there is absolutely no way for you to distinguish "not spinning" from "spinning" by comparisons with other material objects; there aren't any other material objects. Mach took this observation to heart and extended it one giant step further. He suggested that in this case there might also be no way to feel a difference between various states of spinning. More precisely, Mach argued that in an otherwise empty universe there is no distinction between spinning and not spinning—there is no conception of motion or acceleration if there are no benchmarks for comparison—and so spinning and not spinning are the same. If Newton's two rocks tied together by a rope were set spinning in an otherwise empty universe, Mach reasoned that the rope would remain slack. If you spun around in an otherwise empty universe, your arms and legs would not splay outward, and the fluid in your ears would be unaffected; you'd feel nothing.

  This is a deep and subtle suggestion. To really absorb it, you need to put yourself into the example earnestly and fully imagine the black, uniform stillness of totally empty space. It's not like a dark room in which you feel the floor under your feet or in which your eyes slowly adjust to the tiny amount of light seeping in from outside the door or window; instead, we are imagining that there are no things, so there is no floor and there is absolutely no light to adjust to. Regardless of where you reach or look, you feel and see absolutely nothing at all. You are engulfed in a cocoon of unvarying blackness, with no material benchmarks for comparison. And without such benchmarks, Mach argued, the very concepts of motion and acceleration cease to have meaning. It's not just that you won't feel anything if you spin; it's more basic. In an otherwise empty universe, standing perfectly motionless and spinning uniformly are indistinguishable. 3

  Newton, of course, would have disagreed. He claimed that even completely empty space still has space. And, although space is not tangible or directly graspable, Newton argued that it still provides a something with respect to which material objects can be said to move. But remember how Newton came to this conclusion: He pondered rotating motion and assumed that the results familiar from the laboratory (the water's surface becomes concave; Homer feels pressed against the bucket wall; your arms splay outward when you spin around; the rope tied between two spinning rocks becomes taut) would hold true if the experiment were carried out in empty space. This assumption led him to search for something in empty space relative to which the motion could be defined, and the something he came up with was space itself. Mach strongly challenged the key assumption: He argued that what happens in the laboratory is not what would happen in completely empty space.

  Mach's was the first significant challenge to Newton's work in more than two centuries, and for years it sent shock waves through the physics community (and beyond: in 1909, while living in London, Vladimir Lenin wrote a philosophical pamphlet that, among other things, discussed aspects of Mach's work 11 ). But if Mach was right and there was no notion of spinning in an otherwise empty universe—a state of affairs that would eliminate Newton's justification for absolute space—that still leaves the problem of explaining the terrestrial bucket experiment, in which the water certainly does take on a concave shape. Without invoking absolute space—if absolute space is not a something—how would Mach explain the wate
r's shape? The answer emerges from thinking about a simple objection to Mach's reasoning.

  Mach, Motion, and the Stars

  Imagine a universe that is not completely empty, as Mach envisioned, but, instead, one that has just a handful of stars sprinkled across the sky. If you perform the outer-space-spinning experiment now, the stars—even if they appear as mere pinpricks of light coming from enormous distance— provide a means of gauging your state of motion. If you start to spin, the distant pinpoints of light will appear to circle around you. And since the stars provide a visual reference that allows you to distinguish spinning from not spinning, you would expect to be able to feel it, too. But how can a few distant stars make such a difference, their presence or absence somehow acting as a switch that turns on or off the sensation of spinning (or more generally, the sensation of accelerated motion)? If you can feel spinning motion in a universe with merely a few distant stars, perhaps that means Mach's idea is just wrong—perhaps, as assumed by Newton, in an empty universe you would still feel the sensation of spinning.

  Mach offered an answer to this objection. In an empty universe, according to Mach, you feel nothing if you spin (more precisely, there is not even a concept of spinning vs. nonspinning). At the other end of the spectrum, in a universe populated by all the stars and other material objects existing in our real universe, the splaying force on your arms and legs is what you experience when you actually spin. (Try it.) And—here is the point—in a universe that is not empty but that has less matter than ours, Mach suggested that the force you would feel from spinning would lie between nothing and what you would feel in our universe. That is, the force you feel is proportional to the amount of matter in the universe. In a universe with a single star, you would feel a minuscule force on your body if you started spinning. With two stars, the force would get a bit stronger, and so on and so on, until you got to a universe with the material content of our own, in which you feel the full familiar force of spinning. In this approach, the force you feel from acceleration arises as a collective effect, a collective influence of all the other matter in the universe.