We Are Made Of Empty Space

Recently, I have watched a documentary made by Nova, called The Fabric Of The Cosmos. The first episode dealt with concept of space. Or what makes up space.

We think of space as the empty distance between objects. Like if we were standing in the same room, the distance between us would be made up of what appears to be empty space. Now we know that the space only appears empty. We know that there small particles that exist between us. They could be molecules of air, dust, and other small particulates, that we can not see with our eyes.

Now you look at your hand, and it seems solid. Like an unbroken mass of blood, tissue, and bones. However, it is not solid if you look at your hand from the perspective of an atom. From this perspective your hand would have a closer appearance to a forest. That being you would see individual molecules as distinct objects, with empty space between the molecules.

Even at the subatomic level there is this appearance of empty space between the electron, protons, and neutrons. And you can go smaller, from the perspective of the neutrino, the space between electron and proton would appear to be as vast as the distance between the walls of the Grand Canyon would appear to us.

We are made of so much empty space that if you compressed all of the empty space from your body, all the mass would take up the area smaller than that of an electron.  

This has lead me to think along the theory of the Big Bang. Now I do not dispute that the Milky Way Galaxy could have been created in a Big Bang event. Even the entire universe could have been created that way. However, it is hard to imagine it happening all at one time. That is that all of the mass of the universe was contained at one time to a small super dense point in space.

If it all of this is an offshoot of one specific event, then there has to be a center of the universe. And we are either expanding away from this center, or moving back towards this center. The current consensus is that we are still expanding from the center. This is held up by the fact that the redshift of the wavelength, more items in the universe appear to be moving further away from us.

We have a presupposed bias. Everything in our known existence has a beginning, middle and end. Have we just projected this onto the universe? The human mind cannot grasp the true concept of infinity. We cannot see that it is possible that the universe was not started at one point and will end at a future date. And that it could just exist in a infinite loop. Where galaxies are born, expand and die to be reborn again. Maybe, what we are seeing are not an infinite number  galaxies, but the echoes of this and a handful of other galaxies going through this cycle. Maybe we are just seeing our past being replayed million of times, throughout space and time.

We even say that there are constants that dictate physics. What if the speed of light is not the constant we observe. What if it changes based on a medium unknown to us. What if the speed of light pass instantly beyond the influences of a galactic medium? In other words, what if the light generated in a neighboring galaxy accelerates as it leaves the influence of that galaxy and decelerates as it enters the influence of another, with an instantaneous jump between. This is a bit of over simplification. However, remove the instantaneous leap and just leave in the acceleration and deceleration, and our math is completely off. This could mean the universe is bigger and older than we thought, or the opposite. This could also lead to a bias of the redshift when viewing distant objects.

What if time is more like space? The empty spaces that fill in our areas of conscience. The area that we measure between objects to give them dimension. What if time is an artificial construct of the mind to order events that are really happening simultaneously? What if the universe really has no time? Well if this is true we would not find it. Because, it would not conform to what we expect to find. So our own biases form our own truths, even if they turn out not to be true.

What if everything we know is derive from one fractal? After all the pattern on the subatomic mimic the pattern on the galactic level. An atom looks like a small solar system, the solar system looks like a smaller version of the universe. Yes there are variations, but these stem from the parameters of the local physical conditions. Look at a snowflake. It contains this infinite pattern that is finite because of the physical conditions that will not support the ever expanding fractal. Remove all physical properties, and the snowflake would continue to expand along the fractal pattern, that it started from.

I am not trying to engage in sophistry. I am just trying to point out that there is still a lot we don’t know, From the perspective of a neutrino we are only a projection in space. We have very little mass to obstruct the neutrino.  Could our own interpretation of the galaxy be just a projection of what we observe locally, and not paint a true picture of the universe.