Twenty-six centuries of space

Approaching this topic with an open heart and using the analogical mind, it is thus possible to verify how science and esoteric tradition (the designated pillars, together with art, for the evolution of human consciousness) can support and complement each other in simplicity and beauty. […] Though in different manners and languages, these forces descend from the same Source, and to keep them separate, or even to consider them antagonistic, causes stalemate or the disharmonious development of consciousness.

TPS – The Creating Sound

The concept of space that is considered today in Physics is the result of a very long dialogue between Philosophy and Physics that started with Anaximander, Aristotle, and went through Newton, Kant, and Mach, all the way to Einstein. Twenty-six centuries ago, Anaximander wondered how the Sun and Moon could “pass” below the Earth to reappear the next day on the opposite side of the horizon. To answer this question he went so far as to speculate that the Earth was suspended in a “space” and so the Moon and Sun could pass underneath it. Officially, “science” was born with Anaximander. For Aristotle, in his monumental work “Physics”, space is “that which is close to something”: my hand is close to the table that is close to the floor and is close to the window. Aristotelian Space is the sum of the objects that are close to the given object within a certain perimeter, hence the set of objects and relations between objects. For Aristotle, space being a relational concept, there can be no empty space because if I remove everything, all objects, there is nothing empty left, there is nothing at all. For Newton things are different. He calls Aristotelian space the “common concept”, but there is another, universal, fixed, Cartesian, flat, Euclidean space that exists independently of everything. Newton mathematised space so that calculations could be made, formalising the concept of Cartesian distance. In Newtonian space, if you remove all objects, it remains an empty entity and this contradicts Aristotle’s non-existence of empty space. Kant, who tries to establish the concept of space through pure reasoning, also fits into this discussion. Kant studies Newton in depth and concludes that space is an “a priori form of our intuition”. Thus, for Kant, space exists because we intuit it that way and is therefore a product of our thinking. We now know that Kant was wrong because he tried to ground Newton’s work in logic and thought, but today we know that Newton’s laws are only approximate descriptions of the laws of nature. Proof of this is the inability of Newton’s law of universal gravitation to describe the anomalous orbit of Mercury. In order to justify Newton and to make sense of the anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, the existence of a planet (Vulcan) with an orbit more internal to that of Mercury was even hypothesised in 1846. Today we know that the precession of the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit is affected by space-time deformations in the immediate vicinity of the Sun, anomalies that Newton’s laws, in their approximation, could not describe. So if Newton’s framework is incorrect, even Kant cannot derive according to logic and pure reasoning something that is a priori wrong. The discussion on the concept of space continues and we arrive at Einstein’s great insight. In part Einstein agrees with Newton when he says that space is an entity in its own right, but he disagrees with him when Newton states that this entity is absolute and fixed. For Einstein, space is a stage where “events” take place and is pervaded by fields, such as the electromagnetic field which is responsible for all electrical and magnetic phenomena such as radio waves and light, and the Dirac field, which in its “modes” of interaction gives rise to elementary particles such as electrons and quarks (today we know that there is another field that was unknown in Einstein’s time and that is the Higgs field, responsible for the mass of all particles that form known matter).

This stage where the events of nature take place and which contains the natural objects and entities, according to Einstein’s great intuition, is not a fixed and immutable thing (à la Newton), but is itself a field, and to be precise in Physics that’s the “gravitational field”. This concept is very close, in the esoteric vision and far beyond the “physical” dimension of Reality, to the infinite Field of Living Space whose relationships are determined and managed according to the law of Attraction and Repulsion (some of the tentative theories being studied in Physics also envisage situations in which there is “repulsive gravity”). Space is not something where the gravitational field also acts, but is the very field where all other natural events take place. Let us dwell on this concept for a moment because it is fundamental. Let us start with an analogy that should be more explanatory. Suppose we are on an island overflowing with a wealth of wildlife. On this island there are a lot of animals living and doing their own thing. This is Newton’s vision. Now suppose we get a little closer and realise that the island is not an island, but the back of a giant whale. So the animals are not on the land, fixed and unchanging, but on another animal, which can move. This is Einstein’s view, fields act and move in another field that can move in turn. For Einstein, therefore, Newton’s space is the gravitational field when we consider this field as something motionless. In general, then, in the Einsteinian view, what we call space is an aspect of the gravitational field. Here too, as with Aristotle, if we remove the gravitational field, nothing remains. Not an empty space-container, but nothing at all. Einstein’s space can therefore be moved, curved and stretched. Another great scientist, John Wheeler, summed this up very well by saying: “Matter-energy tells space how to curve and space tells matter-energy how to move and flow”. This phenomenon that Wheeler talks about is something we have before our eyes all the time. It sounds like he is about to say something absurd, but it is true that when we throw a ball it moves in a straight line. The ball moves in a straight line, but in a curved space and that is why we see its trajectory draw a parabola. Space is curved because the mass of the Earth warps the surrounding space. The planets of the solar system move in a rectilinear way, but also in a space curved by the mass of the Sun and that is why we see elliptical orbits. What we call “curved space” here is Einstein’s gravitational field. What Newton called the force of gravity at a distance, with Einstein loses the connotation of “force” and becomes a totally geometric feature of space, which in turn is one aspect of a physical (gravitational) field such as the Dirac field or the Electromagnetic field.

We’ve got to 1915. In 1926, when his relativity had already been amply demonstrated, Einstein wrote: “Yes, my theory is admirable, but it cannot be the end point on the concept of Space and Time. For there is Quantum Mechanics”. Einstein had already realised that in order to better define and expand the concept of space, he had to go a step further by understanding the very strange concepts derived from Quantum Mechanics. Today, more than one hundred years after the publication of Relativity and almost one hundred years after Heisenberg’s mathematical formalisation of Quantum Mechanics, we are still waiting for this step further. There are tentative theories that aim to unify these two great conceptual achievements of the last century, and promising steps have been taken in this direction, but we have not yet been able to fully understand how to reconcile Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Yes, because taken separately these two great theories work amazingly well. The experimental evidence is extraordinary. But apparently Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are incompatible with each other. So how is it possible that there are two theories that model the same universe wonderfully well but do not work when considered together? What is needed is a further step and this click, again, involves changing the concept we have of space. If for Einstein, (physical) space is a manifestation of a field (the gravitational field), today this field must be considered quantum. What does this mean? It means that we must take into account that space is not only something continuous, but also something “discrete” (the fabric of subspace), formed by granules, by “quanta of space”, such as the quanta of the electromagnetic field (photons) or the quanta of the Dirac field (particles).

In this sense, the term “discrete” should not be understood as an adjective, but as a verb (“discretum” is the past participle of the Latin verb that means “to discern”). If space is therefore quantized, it will behave in all those “strange” ways to which Quantum Mechanics has accustomed us, such as losing the concept of causality (what happens before is the cause of what happens after) and the concept of measurement (Heisemberg’s uncertainty principle); measuring time and space at this level therefore loses its meaning (this is a point of fundamental importance, requiring a wide discussion which will be the subject of a future article). Space as we perceive it (exoteric) would then be the manifestation of an “emerging process” that starts from a substratum of quantum uncertainty. In simple words: “There is something, an essential plot that, thanks to a catalysing something, leads to a phase transformation (like from water to ice) and becomes space (and time) as we perceive it. It becomes the Universe as we know it”. This is the difficult part to understand and if you can’t, don’t worry because no one has understood it for a hundred years, but Physics shows us that this is the right direction to follow. So after 26 centuries of continuous mutation of the concept of space, we are again at a point where another leap, another change of perspective is needed. Perspective where space (manifest or “physical”) is made up of granules (these granules can be compared to the aformal “atoms” of Occult Science, the basic units of Matter/spatial Substance, unmanifest to our human consciousness. On this subject see: The Principles of Light and Color by Edwin D. Babbit) of gravitational field, where space is nothing more than a process emerging from a phase transition, where space is an entity arising from a “push” that is the origin of this transition. Physics does not yet know what this thrust is. Theories in this direction are being constructed. Can Physics alone get these answers? Perhaps not. The long dialogue between Physics and Philosophy continues and it must expand and enrich itself more and more.