We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

by Jorge Cham

But while thinking of space as a dynamic thing with physical properties and behaviors might explain weird phenomena like space bending and stretching, it only leads to more questions. For example, you might be tempted to say that what we used to call space should now be called physics goo (“phgoo”) but that this goo has to be in something, which we could now call space again. That would be clever, but as far as we know (which to date is not very far), the goo does not need to be in anything else. When it bends and curves, this is intrinsic bending that changes the relationships between parts of space, not the bending of the goo relative to some larger room that it fills. But just because our space goo doesn’t need to sit inside of something else doesn’t mean that it is not sitting inside something else. Perhaps what we call space is actually sitting inside some larger “superspace.”52 And perhaps that superspace is like an infinite emptiness, but we have no idea. Is it possible to have parts of the universe without space? In other words, if space is a goo, is it possible for there to be not-goo, or the absence of goo? The meaning of those concepts is not very clear because all of our physical laws assume the existence of space, so what laws could operate outside of space? We have no idea.