The expression “fabric of spacetime” is commonly encountered in literature explaining the basic concepts of Einsteinian Relativity, especially General Relativity. We are told that mass imposes a “warping” or “curving” effect on the “fabric” of spacetime. But is there hoodpay really anything as a “fabric of spacetime?” What is meant by “the fabric of spacetime?” Or is the frequent reference to “fabric of spacetime” only a figure of speech?
Some physicists will regard the expression “fabric of spacetime” only as a figure of speech. However, the phenomena of dark energy and dark matter in relation to the basic concepts of quantum electrodynamics(QED) will appear to support a literal interpretation of the expression “fabric of space,” for the idea in QED is that there is an ubiquitous “sea of energy” represented in QED studies in the concept of electromagnetic fields. Particles, in this context, represent fluctuations or excitations on the otherwise invisible matrix of a yet to be precisely defined background matrix of energy.
Recent developments in QED suggest that the traditional notion of vacuum redribbonlive as literally “empty space” is not, after all, a valid notion. The controversial mathematical procedure of renormalization, in estimating predictions in QED, arises from attempts to avoid any explicit consideration of this apparently infinite background field of energy by reckoning only the difference between the energy of the background and the energy of the matter in it.
The pervasiveness of this background field of energy leads to the suggestion that it is the “fabric of space” itself and that elementary particles are the result of symmetry breaking transformations in an otherwise symmetric matrix.
David Bohm, in his Wholeness and the Implicate Order, provides the analogy of a crystal at theoretical absolute zero. The crystal allows electrons to pass through without scattering, as if the space the crystal occupies were really empty. If, however, temperature is raised, ristomanager structural inhomogeneities arise in the crystal which scatter the electrons. If we were to use the electrons to try to observe the crystal, only the regions of inhomogeneity will be visible and the intervening regions would appear as empty space.
Physicists similarly conceive of symmetry breaking phase transitions of an underlying symmetry in their big bang theory of the origin of the universe. The most commonly used analogy are the phase transitions when solid ice is heated and it changes from ice to water and then to gaseous state. Each stage in the transition involves an increase in symmetry. Similarly at the big bang, when the universe was hot, it was relatively symmetric, but as the universe expanded and cooled, it went through phase transitions which produced the structured universe we have today.
In this context, we may conceive of space as equivalent to a symmetric field of energy which we perceive as void being the relatively homogeneous matrix from which elementary particles, under certain conditions, are derived by symmetry breaking transformations of the matrix. We tend to MATRIX CRACK look through space as void, just as one continues looking through rather than seeing plane glass till attention is drawn to the symmetry breaking warning: MIND THE GLASS. One may therefore conveniently employ the analogy of the smooth surface of polished glass in illustrating the concept of symmetry breaking phase transitions which produced our universe of matter and energy; matter being analogous to local cracked portions of the glass.
Dark matter can be readily understood to be some form of matter formed in the symmetry breaking phase transformations of cosmic evolution as effect halo around major regions of concentration of visible or luminous matter, and the more mysterious dark energy some form of energy associated with the vacuum state.
