THE SPACE IS CREATOR. THE DISPUTE BETWEEN NEWTON AND EINSTEIN.

If you will deeply thought about the significance of the word “Space” you will have to admit that practically impossible to say about it something definite and really explain what it is.

Such words as “emptiness”, “vacuum”, “infinity”, “Universe” or something of the sort will come to mind.

Agree it’s not easy for the human to talk about what is empty for him (her) – invisibly, unheard, impalpable, without taste and smell, while all around us we can touch, see, hear, scent and taste.

As a result, in the minds of most people, the space has always been no more than an endless volume of emptiness where there is our world and we - in other words, something non-existent.

The thinkers of philosophy and science have spent a good deal of time and effort trying to discover the relations between the space and all the objects in it.

Sure, originally the scientists are mainly interested in the space from a practical point of view. Even in ancient times people had experienced a need to know the distance between the bodies as accurately as possible.

A distance measurement is a measurement in the space. For this purpose there is geometry, the basis of which was laid in III century before Christ by Euclid. He considered the space as “emptiness”. From his point of view it is isotropy, homogeneous and limitless.

For realization of distance measurements it was needed to Euclid only three coordinates as opposite to the multitudes following of the Einstein physics, for whom it’s not enough three and they brought down on us yet the fourth coordinate (dimension), fifth, sixth and so on. What are they for?

Hereinafter the scientific views on this question became all more to approach to the philosophical.

In this scientific-philosophical synthesis we view the space everywhere together with other category – “time”. For them there was contra posed the “Matter” or otherwise “material objects”.

In the history of philosophy there are two concepts describing the relation to each other of the space (and the time) and objects in it.

We name one of them as substantial, and other – as relational.

Disagreement with each other of these concepts is directly connected with the scientific dispute of the classic mechanics and relativistic. This scientific debate we can call as the “dispute of Newton and Einstein extended through the time”.

The basis of classical mechanic is the substantial concept according to this the space (and the time) exists by itself, regardless of the objects located inside this space.

I. Newton supposed that the space where we live is like the forever existing, unrestrictedly large, fixed “box” without sides – the container of the Matter. The properties of this "box" do not change over time and do not depend on how the substance distributes and redistributes in it.

Isaac Newton

The Space of Newton and Euclid is not able to shrink and stretch – i.e. to curve. Therefore, in this space the shortest distance between two points - is always a straight line and not a curve.

The relational concept (hence the similar name) lies in the framework of relativistic mechanics. Proponents of this view consider that the "space" is produced by the objects existing in it.

The space of A. Einstein can bent (contract and expand) and it is a non-Euclidean (or in other words a non-Newtonian).

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 1093