If you remove you, me, cars, buildings and everything on earth, what's left is earth.
If you remove the earth, the sun, the galaxies, what's left out is those tiny particles of atoms..
If you remove these particles... what's left out is nothing...
Is there something?
Empty Space.
Is there nothing?
Empty Space.
Is nothing something?
So REAL that this Empty Space forms everything. It is the essential fabric of the universe.
It was Sir Isaac Newton during the 18th century visualized what space could be.
When apple fell on the ground, You and I may have picked it up ;)
But it occurred to Newton that there's a force that pulls the object towards the earth. The very force that keeps us away from flying into space. GRAVITY.
With the fall of an apple was the Birth of Modern Physics.
He devised laws of motion that governs objects' motion, how you, me, everything we see around, the earth, the moon, the sun, and how all the galaxies move.
These laws are so well that we use them today for anything you could imagine, launching satellites to landing planes, cars, trains, engines, EVERYTHING that could move.
The laws all hinge on one radical idea, SPACE.
SPACE is REAL.
A skater spins around. She could realize that she spins because she could see those objects around her 'moving'. What is she spinning in relation to?
If he/she has to spin in empty space, she could not see those objects around her. But her hands span out. Newton would say that the skater's hands span out because she spins in relation to SPACE itself.
According to Newton, space is so real but passive. ie., Space does not affect the objects and the objects does not affect space and that space is static, never changing.
This notion about space was untouched until the clerk in the swiss patent office revisited the thinking about SPACE.
His Name: Albert Einstein
Newton laws could not explain how Earth and Moon do not collide with each other due to gravity or How moon rotates the earth in the same orbit.
It was Einstein's envision on space that answers these.
According to Einstein, space could bend, twist, ripple. It is a thin a fabric that has it's own characteristics.
To explain:
Consider that the billiards table is made out of thin plastic sheet.
What will happen if you place a heavy object in the middle of this sheet?
Now, this is where it gets interesting and that made Einstein 'Einstein'.
You'd notice that the object is sunk, dip and creates a bend in the middle of the sheet in such a way that if you were to place a marble at one end of the sheet, it is going to slide towards the center where the heavy object is. If you were to place the marble in different sides of the sheet, you'll notice that the marble revolves around the object in a swirling motion until it hits the object.
Imagine this heavy object as the SUN and Earth being the marble, OR, Earth being the object and the Moon being the marble.
So what is this plastic sheet that showed it's characteristics as soon as you place these objects?
--- SPACE ---
Einstein is one of the Greatest Scientists of mankind...
Einstein called this as 'SPACE TIME CURVATURE'..
What an idea...
Space warps the moon in it's curvature in a way that moon rotates the earth in it's orbit.
This force that swirls smaller objects around the bigger objects because of the space curvature is GRAVITY. The fabric of the universe, SPACE, creates a curvature when objects of heavy masses are placed in it and they all are bound towards each other through GRAVITY.
GRAVITY binds you, me, the buildings on earth. It is the force that binds the moon in it's orbit..the same force that binds earth to orbit around the sun. It is the force that binds the solar system, the stars in the galaxy and the galaxies in the universe...
.....because of the curvature of SPACE TIME.
SPACE is so dynamic and it is still one of the deepest mysteries that mankind need to understand.
Disclaimer: The sole purpose of this article is to share the fascination. The content of this blog has been created from multiple sources(youtube, science articles, interviews etc.,).
