Should it be space-time or spacetime – and why does it matter anyway?

One of the most clumsy parts of writing a book is that, ultimately, the authors must ask people “exposed” – the approvals you see on the cover of a book, encouraging you to buy it. I am now in this phase with The edge of space-time. I write to people and ask them to read my book and send me beautiful words on this subject, in exchange for anything other than my good will.

It’s a bit scary, but it can also be interesting. A person – whose approval will become public later – sent to his presentation text with a question: why did I choose “space -time” with a link rather than “spacetime”?

It seems that it is “just a grammar”, but something else hides. When we talk about space or time separately, we have an intuitive sense of what we are talking about. Space -time – or space -time – is relatively new in scientific vocabulary. Even if, throughout history, many cultures have had unified concepts that do not separate space and time, as a profession, physics has designed them as distinct longer than we understood.

And from my point of view as a scientific communicator, it is always an extremely difficult concept to explain. Even trying to describe “space” is difficult. By writing this, I thought of saying that space is the place where movement occurs. But in a sense, movement also occurs over time. I could say that space is the place where things live, but again, I suppose that a similar statement could be made about time. I also thought of saying that space is a geography site, but it seems both very academic and tautological. This simply means that space is the site of spatial things.

To really talk about space and time, it is counting on an intuition that I suppose you have. So let’s say that space has three dimensions in which we move, and that time has a dimension in which we move but that in a direction.

But, as Albert Einstein pointed out, these are not really separate phenomena. Especially when you get closer to the speed of light, observers moving at different speeds will not necessarily agree on the moment when events occur. They can also disagree on the size of the objects. To really grasp all of this, we would force us to measure space-time, rather than space or time separately. It does not necessarily seem natural, but it is the best way to give meaning to the way things work.

In this context, it is worth thinking about space-time a fusion of two familiar phenomena or something new. This is where grammar is a reflection of our scientific sensitivities, at least for me.

My last name contains the first union trait that I have ever met: my parents decided that I had to bear their two family names. So, for me, Prescod-Weinstein means that I am a Prescod and a Weinstein.

The version dealing with space-time can be read as indicating that the phenomenon we describe is both space and time. Alternatively, drop the link to make it as “space-time” could suggest that we are talking about something completely new. Something that has characteristics of space and time, but is a third separate thing.

So, do we face something that is space and time-a space-time-or approximations of space and time for the concept completely different from space-time? I am a bit of a fence. My first book, underlined The Burbur-Writer, did not use the Union trait, which raises the question of why I made the change.

The easy answer is that the title of the new book appears in the first pages of a classic manual on cosmology, The large-scale structure of space-time By Stephen Hawking and George Fr Ellis. At the very beginning of the first chapter, Hawking and Ellis maintain that the resolution of the equations that describe the universe “implies thinking about the edge of space-time in a certain sense”. Two pages later, they say that the singularities, the places where the equations decompose (like the center of a black hole), can be considered as “representing part of the edge of space-time”.

In my book, I have a chapter where I explain what types of equations they speak and the importance of the limits and edges in physics. And as I was going to take this sentence for the title of my book, I had to commit and spell things as they did.

This is the easy answer. But more deeply, I don’t know which side I am on. I suppose that, like my writer, I lean towards space-time without a line of union. But I have no idea of ​​the amount of strength of the habit of typing the subtitle of my last book so many times. Scientifically, I think I am inclined to say that space-time is space and time-and also a third thing, space-time. It may be a very quantum-mechanical answer, but I want it to be both simultaneously!

Chanda week

What I read

I’m super excited about Charlie Jane Anders’ new novelMagic and disaster lessons.

What I look at

I just caught up the science fiction series Invasion, And it’s really interesting.

What do I work

I integrate a new postdoctoral researcher in my group.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of the disorderly cosmos and the next book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry and The Cosmic Dream Boogie