Ever wonder how space gets warped in theory of Einstein’s relativity when space is defined as a vacuum void of mater and energy? We all know a lot about empty space intuitively. We all know that if we jump off a bridge or a mountain cliff that we will fall into a void of relative empty space. That is certainly a good reason to avoid empty space. We have a different impression of empty space when we are not delivering our self from solid ground below our feet where we usually consider empty space to be all around us mostly filled in by the air which we breath and can feel as wind or having warm or cool gas in it. We drive in a car or a train and we believe we are moving into space ahead of us. We would not be able to drive straight ahead if there were a solid concrete wall across the road where upon we could all become test crash dummies if we attempted it. We look up at the sky and we all know there is an infinite amount of empty space above which happens to be a purer vacuum without much air the higher one goes. Then we go to school and we learn about how to calculate velocity and miles per hour when we drive a car. We are certain that if we drive at 60 miles per hour that we will cover 1 mile of empty space in one minute because there are just 60 minutes in every hour. Sure there is air resistance and other factors involved including use of energy to propell our car forward though time and space. What is really happening is that we may not be moving though space at all. As easily as we can say we are going a mile a minute or a minute per mile we can’t necessarily say we have moved anywhere in space. We have moved the distance according to metrics that we can find along the side of the road such as one tenth mile markers along the highway or by reading our speedometer which measure the feet moved per rotation of the car’s tires. Have we really moved though space? The answer may be no.
How can we go a mile a minute and not move though space at all? Well simply because in all of the universe there is only one unit of empty space for the entire universe or universes as maybe. If one happens to suck all the air out of a light bulb or out of an aluminum can creating a nearly perfect hard vacuum of empty space, we see that the light bulb contains a vacuum and maintains it’s shape with very modest warp or transformation and the aluminum can if not thick enough aluminum maintains the hard vacuum by completely collapsing into itself as to totally change its dimensions in being compacted and compressed with its outer walls forced into each other. In either case we also know the vacuum exists inside these when cosed to the outer atmosphere so the outer atmosphere putts pressure on their outer surfaces. The light bulb with the air sucked out to give it a hard vacuum wants to collapse as much as the aluminum can actually does. That vacuum in outer space does not actually exist. That vacuum is relative to the external atmosphere here on earth. We can take both the hard vacuum light bulb and the vacuum air removed can up in a rocket to the vacuum in outer space and release the trap vacuum to the rest of empty space in the universe without any addition of empty space happening. Where we have changed the equation is empty space out in near earth orbit is suddenly less empty. There we have a light bulb and an scrunched can. No matter how much of a vacuum we create on the surface of the earth maybe by getting rid of the atmosphere on earth by freezing it and capturing it in tanks and then compressing the earth into a much smaller sphere than it is to begin with we can do the math and find we have added absolutely no more volume to outer space than it started with. Now lets pretend in a mental experiment Einstein style that we can shrink the earth by some unknown method to the size of a glass marble, the typical type children play with, by making the earth into a black hole. The earth becomes very dense So dense that if you could weigh it it would weigh the same as it does full size. Also because it’s mass has not changed it would even keep the exact same orbit it had around the sun and the moon would continue to revolve around it just as it had before it was shrunk down in size. That would create more space in terms of the distance from the earth to the moon or the earth to the sun. One could do some volumetric calculations and just subtract the volume of the earth as a black hole from what it used to be as its normal self before that and that would be the empty space you might say you gained.
You did not really gain any space because you really just squeezed empty space out of the earth as it was to make it much more dense and probably more energetic as a result of confining so much mass in such a small space as that of a marble. If the orbit of the moon and earth’s orbit around the sun have not changed as a result the space “created” would be measurable? It is really no different than releasing the empty space from the light bulb taken up by the rocket. There is something that can happen as per the influence of gravity. Because the distance between the moon and the concentrated mass of the earth will have changed the inverse square law of how gravity acts from a distance could play a role. I guess I assume that the earth’s gravity has to increase in concentration in a black hole sized marble such that it acts with the same force on the moon as pertains to having a tidal effect on the moon. But would the moon still have the same tidal effect on the earth having been shrunk to the size of a marble sized black hole the difference between the earth’s original circumference and that of the smaller marble within? I would think that the earth’s tidal influence on the moon should probably be about the same. I could be wrong. I would think that the moon’s tidal influence on the tiny marble size black hole would become more negligible. None of those considerations have anything to do with time or space what we are dealing with is the metrics of measuring distance using gravitational forces mass and the qualities of the orbits involved.
On earth we can fly an airplane by propelling it forward with propellers or jets and we can have birds flap their wings to fly forward. In space we cannot use those methods to propell our rockets forward beyond our rocket gravity escape velocity. To propell a rocket ahead in empty space we use equal and opposite reactions to move us forward by having thrust behind the rocket which usually means we have to use up gas by forcing it out behind the rocket and losing it. That seems rather funny that in order to move in empty space that you should have to throw out energy or mass behind your space ship to move forward when all of space is just one unit in the entire universe. Lets say that i really believe that the entire universe of galaxies and stars as seen by major telescopes is filled with empty space between all of these objects. Then what is my real location? If i am anywhere in empty space maybe i am everywhere in empty space because there is just one unit of it everywhere? If I am up in outer space I have to look at things i know or think i know to judge my distance . If i am going to the moon i can measure the distance by knowing the size of the moon , the size of the earth, the position of the sun and stars . If everything in the universes suddenly went dark or my space craft had no windows and no censors I might have to judge the distances by the feel of fainting gravitational tugging on the space ship or just have faith turn on the thrustors release hot exploding gases behind the craft and move “forward” into space where ever I was going.
Classical physics texts tell us that the speed of light is constant in vacuum. light does not have any known gas thrusters guiding it forward. If i shoot my head light out from my space craft going at half the speed of light the light is not supposed to be able to go any faster than the speed of light . If i pass someone with a flashlight standing still somewhere in the universe at that point his light beam will not be going any faster than mine and someone ahead of both of us will receive both beams at the same time. This always assumes space is an empty vacuum. My space ship will arrive at the point where the beam is received before the guy with the flashlight standing still . He might never arrive there but his light beam has as has my head light beam. I have spent x amount of time verses my light beam that would get there in exactly half the time if i were going half the speed of light. The question is then if the distance as measured by the light beam speed or any other means of metric markers along the way, is if I actually have traveled though space at all? How can you travel though something that is not there, can’t be measured by itself? My travel is all about distance which is not about space it is about a kind of linear metric assumption. The best clock to measure it by is of curse the speed of light of my headlights going back to where I started the trip. When i start out I turn on my headlights with a red signal beam and it should get there in half time if my average speed becomes half the speed of light. That really says that time is exactly the same thing as distance covered. There is really no proof i am moving though space, in spite of space, in any metric of space. I may end up closer to other objects in space but I have not traveled or affected space nor can i somehow warp it by changing the metrics of how i calculate the time that goes by based on the speed of light in the vacuum conditions i also travel in.
That means that all great object of high density and low density in space have mass that does not really define space at all. Lets say I could condense the entire universe of galaxies, gases, stars and planets and anything else out there into one big big bang size marble of a black hole according to prevailing physics speculative theories. I would ring a lot of empty space out of all the mass in the universe such that mass and energy would all be concentrated at one tiny point in space with nearly infinite mass and energy and all of empty space around it would still be a singularity of oneness. One unit of empty space. This is where the real fun part comes in. If all of the mass in the universe is compressed into a dot that is about the size of the head of a pin or even that of the marble sized shrinking earth discussed already then is it existing in a larger infinite empty space or the same size empty space form which all that mass and energy of the entire universe came from? I would be crazy to think that I could condense empty space just because i condensed all the mass in the universe into a tiny speck of super high gravity high mass black hole singularity. First of all in doing this there would be no way in the universe to even detect the existence of the this singular tiny speck supremely massive black hole. Only it could know it existed. Empty space would not know a thing as it would be 100 percent hard vacuum. How big could that empty space be then? It would then probably be no bigger than the biggest mass in the universe which would be exactly the same size as the only object in the universe that tiny speck black hole. What does that mean? It means that space necessarily shrinks right along with anything that acts like a black hole. It has to. At least when you have just one black hole containing everything. Why would anyone imagine empty space being larger than the things out in empty space we use to define space? If you take away reference points space must necessarily collapse. Going back to collapsing the size of the earth as a black hole. that would be exactly the same thing happening except that your frame of reference will still have other metric points in space that will seemingly not collapse space. Because the sun would remain as it was and the moon and other planets etc would not necessarily have to change if we only shrunk the earth in size as a black hole. Maybe something would have to give way if the earth were collapsed and space would be incrementally collapsed in the region. Maybe the solar system would collapse exactly by the amount of space created by the earth downsizing. That seems unlikely.
What works for empty space with the reverse of a big bang event must necessarily collapse space as well as time because time is the distance between all points and there is no distance between one and only single point in the whole universe. Even though space has collapsed it is still just as much space as there originally was. Because no mater what there can only be one unit of space in all the universe and universes by definition. Space is shared by all objects. Their distance from one another does not increase space it then just expands it. What that would seem to mean is that volumetric considerations of space and distances are really just a kind of mental illusion. Not everyone believes we are in some big bang aftermath universe defined by spaces and explosion geometries. Some of us might wonder if the thesis of wormholes is just as silly as building a giant vacuum cleaner and getting sucked up into to it.
If the universe is just one void then maybe it is not exactly as it seems to be? There are other theories like Aether theory where space is considered to have dimensions and material or energetic underpinning forces or metrics not just defined by object residing within it’s singular oneness. So far there is little evidence for aether being a viable theory even though some of the mysteries of quantum mechanics seem to suggest that space does actually have properties and dimensions or that it is a medium to send waves though. That is probably a silly thesis to–probably no sillier than thinking that gravity or mass can warp space time because of frames of reference thought mechanics. How do you change the dimensions of time which is based on independent metrics that are not allied or associated with space? You then find you are condensing empty space which can’t really be condensed or you are modifying what distance is by not attributing distances to being pretty much the exact same thing as a time metric.
If really empty space is really just one vast single unit than maybe it is impossible to actually travel though it. we know that is false. right? we have been to the moon and have sent probes out of the solar system. How come we can just send a space craft into empty space and have it be virtually everywhere in the universe at once? That would be the case if we shrunk the entire universe into a super massive black hole on some theoretical basis that we could do it. That means that all of empty space would shrink to contain all of the universe which means it only seems to be spread out with the universe in the existing spreading form. That leads to another question. Maybe we have never been out in space because maybe if it is just a stretched out frame of reference singularity we can travel though it instantaneously virtually anywhere because it is all the same single unit that contains everything and is no bigger than the stuff contained with in it. Maybe when we finally find a an actual worm hole in outer space or even some where on the surface of the earth it will be something like a vacuum cleaner nozzle that condenses all of mater into one object and condenses space along with it. Maybe the reason light speed seems to be constant and why it travels as fast as it seems to is because it is able to travel though a vacuum not because the vacuum make it easier to travel faster. That would be a really weird theory. We tend to define space as zero instead of defining it as one big zero. We tend to see space as something that can expand to fit objects distant from one another into rather than seeing space as not being distance. If it has no internal metric like aether space has no intrinsic distances. The distance we observe are metered by object we see which we use to define our metric and those metrics basically come down to becoming time to move from one object to another assuming a metric of time to get acceleration and velocity involved in the thinking process.