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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Space is the boundless extent within which objects and events are located relative to one another.^[1]. While physical space has been generally conceived in three linear dimensions, modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional extent known as spacetime. In mathematics, spaces with different numbers of dimensions has been examined.

Among physicists and philosophers, disagreement continues regarding whether space is itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework. Many of the philosophical questions arose in the 17th century, during the early development of classical mechanics. In Isaac Newton's view, space was absolute - in the sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there were any matter in the space.^[2] Other natural philosophers, notably Gottfried Leibniz, thought instead that space was a collection of relations between objects, given by their distance and direction from one another. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant described space and time as elements of a systematic framework which humans unavoidably use to structure their experience.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, mathematicians began to examine non-Euclidean geometries, in which space can be said to be curved, rather than flat. According to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, space around gravitational fields deviates from Euclidean space.^[3] Experimental tests of general relativity have confirmed that non-Euclidean space is the better model for explaining the existing relevant laws of mechanics and optics.