This rich and complex range of phenomena – bending of rays of light, modification of Newton’s force, slowing down of clocks, black holes, gravitational waves, expansion of the universe, the Big Bang – follow from understanding that space is not a dull, fixed container but possesses its own dynamic, its own ‘physics’, just like the matter and the other fields it contains. Democritus himself would have smiled with pleasure, had he been able to see that his idea of space would turn out to have such an impressive future. It is true that he termed it non-being, but what he meant by being (δέν) was
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