This article is about the general framework of distance and direction.

For the space beyond

Earth's atmosphere, see Outer space. For the keyboard key, see Space bar. For other uses,
see Space (disambiguation).

A right-handed three-dimensionalCartesian coordinate system used to indicate positions in space.

Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative
position and direction.[1] Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions,
although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless fourdimensional continuum known as spacetime. In mathematics, "spaces" are examined with
different numbers of dimensions and with different underlying structures. The concept of
space is considered to be of fundamental importance to an understanding of the
physicaluniverse. However, disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is
itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework.
Debates concerning the nature, essence and the mode of existence of space date back to
antiquity; namely, to treatises like the Timaeusof Plato, or Socrates in his reflections on what
the Greeks called khora (i.e. "space"), or in the Physics of Aristotle (Book IV, Delta) in the
definition of topos (i.e. place), or in the later "geometrical conception of place" as
"space qua extension" in the Discourse on Place (Qawl fi al-Makan) of the 11th-century Arab
polymath Alhazen.[2] Many of these classical philosophical questions were discussed in
theRenaissance and then reformulated in the 17th century, particularly during the early
development of classical mechanics. In Isaac Newton's view, space was absolutein the
sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there was any matter in the
space.[3] Other natural philosophers, notably Gottfried Leibniz, thought instead that space
was in fact a collection of relations between objects, given by
their distance and direction from one another. In the 18th century, the philosopher and
theologian George Berkeleyattempted to refute the "visibility of spatial depth" in his Essay
Towards a New Theory of Vision. Later, the metaphysician Immanuel Kant said that neither

space nor time can be empirically perceivedthey are elements of a systematic framework
that humans use to structure all experiences. Kant referred to "space" in his Critique of Pure
Reason as being a subjective "pure a priori form of intuition", hence it is an unavoidable
contribution of our human faculties.
In the 19th and 20th centuries mathematicians began to examine geometries that are not
Euclidean, in which space can be said to be curved, rather than flat. According to Albert
Einstein's theory of general relativity, space around gravitational fields deviates from
Euclidean space.[4] Experimental tests of general relativity have confirmed that non-Euclidean
geometries provide a better model for the shape of space.
Contents
[hide]

1 Philosophy of space
o

1.1 Leibniz and Newton

1.2 Kant

1.3 Non-Euclidean geometry

1.4 Gauss and Poincar

1.5 Einstein

2 Mathematics

3 Physics
o

3.1 Classical mechanics

3.2 Relativity

3.3 Cosmology

4 Spatial measurement

5 Geographical space

6 In psychology

7 See also

8 References

9 External links

Philosophy of space
Leibniz and Newton

Gottfried Leibniz

In the seventeenth century, the philosophy of space and time emerged as a central issue
in epistemology and metaphysics. At its heart, Gottfried Leibniz, the German philosophermathematician, and Isaac Newton, the English physicist-mathematician, set out two
opposing theories of what space is. Rather than being an entity that independently exists
over and above other matter, Leibniz held that space is no more than the collection of spatial
relations between objects in the world: "space is that which results from places taken
together".[5] Unoccupied regions are those that couldhave objects in them, and thus spatial
relations with other places. For Leibniz, then, space was an idealised abstraction from the
relations between individual entities or their possible locations and therefore could not
be continuous but must be discrete.[6] Space could be thought of in a similar way to the
relations between family members. Although people in the family are related to one another,
the relations do not exist independently of the people. [7] Leibniz argued that space could not
exist independently of objects in the world because that implies a difference between two
universes exactly alike except for the location of the material world in each universe. But
since there would be no observational way of telling these universes apart then, according to
the identity of indiscernibles, there would be no real difference between them. According to
the principle of sufficient reason, any theory of space that implied that there could be these
two possible universes must therefore be wrong. [8]

Isaac Newton

Newton took space to be more than relations between material objects and based his
position on observation and experimentation. For a relationistthere can be no real difference
between inertial motion, in which the object travels with constant velocity, and non-inertial
motion, in which the velocity changes with time, since all spatial measurements are relative
to other objects and their motions. But Newton argued that since non-inertial motion
generates forces, it must be absolute.[9] He used the example of water in a spinning bucket to
demonstrate his argument. Water in a bucket is hung from a rope and set to spin, starts with
a flat surface. After a while, as the bucket continues to spin, the surface of the water
becomes concave. If the bucket's spinning is stopped then the surface of the water remains
concave as it continues to spin. The concave surface is therefore apparently not the result of
relative motion between the bucket and the water.[10] Instead, Newton argued, it must be a
result of non-inertial motion relative to space itself. For several centuries the bucket
argument was considered decisive in showing that space must exist independently of matter.

Kant

Immanuel Kant

In the eighteenth century the German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed a theory
of knowledge in which knowledge about space can be both a priori and synthetic.

[11]

According to Kant, knowledge about space is synthetic, in that statements about space are

not simply true by virtue of the meaning of the words in the statement. In his work, Kant
rejected the view that space must be either a substance or relation. Instead he came to the
conclusion that space and time are not discovered by humans to be objective features of the
world, but are part of an unavoidable systematic framework for organizing our experiences. [12]