Space

[3] Experimental tests of general relativity have confirmed that non-Euclidean geometries provide a better model for the shape of space.

[citation needed] Debates concerning the nature, essence and the mode of existence of space date back to antiquity; namely, to treatises like the Timaeus of Plato, or Socrates in his reflections on what the Greeks called khôra (i.e. "space"), or in the Physics of Aristotle (Book IV, Delta) in the definition of topos (i.e. place), or in the later "geometrical conception of place" as "space qua extension" in the Discourse on Place (Qawl fi al-Makan) of the 11th-century Arab polymath Alhazen.

[5] In contrast, other natural philosophers, notably Gottfried Leibniz, thought that space was in fact a collection of relations between objects, given by their distance and direction from one another.

In the 18th century, the philosopher and theologian George Berkeley attempted to refute the "visibility of spatial depth" in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.

Galilean and Cartesian theories about space, matter, and motion are at the foundation of the Scientific Revolution, which is understood to have culminated with the publication of Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687.

[7] As one of the pioneers of modern science, Galileo revised the established Aristotelian and Ptolemaic ideas about a geocentric cosmos.

Galileo wanted to prove instead that the Sun moved around its axis, that motion was as natural to an object as the state of rest.

[8] Descartes set out to replace the Aristotelian worldview with a theory about space and motion as determined by natural laws.

His theories belong to the rationalist tradition, which attributes knowledge about the world to our ability to think rather than to our experiences, as the empiricists believe.

In the eighteenth century the German philosopher Immanuel Kant published his theory of space as "a property of our mind" by which "we represent to ourselves objects as outside us, and all as in space" in the Critique of Pure Reason[17] On his view the nature of spatial predicates are "relations that only attach to the form of intuition alone, and thus to the subjective constitution of our mind, without which these predicates could not be attached to anything at all.

Knowledge of space itself is a priori because it belongs to the subjective constitution of our mind as the form or manner of our intuition of external objects.

In this geometry, an infinite number of parallel lines pass through the point P. Consequently, the sum of angles in a triangle is less than 180° and the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is greater than pi.

Although there was a prevailing Kantian consensus at the time, once non-Euclidean geometries had been formalised, some began to wonder whether or not physical space is curved.

Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German mathematician, was the first to consider an empirical investigation of the geometrical structure of space.

[22] He considered the predicament that would face scientists if they were confined to the surface of an imaginary large sphere with particular properties, known as a sphere-world.

In this world, the temperature is taken to vary in such a way that all objects expand and contract in similar proportions in different places on the sphere.

With a suitable falloff in temperature, if the scientists try to use measuring rods to determine the sum of the angles in a triangle, they can be deceived into thinking that they inhabit a plane, rather than a spherical surface.

[23] In fact, the scientists cannot in principle determine whether they inhabit a plane or sphere and, Poincaré argued, the same is true for the debate over whether real space is Euclidean or not.

[25] In 1905, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which led to the concept that space and time can be viewed as a single construct known as spacetime.

Furthermore, in Einstein's general theory of relativity, it is postulated that spacetime is geometrically distorted – curved – near to gravitationally significant masses.

[27] One consequence of this postulate, which follows from the equations of general relativity, is the prediction of moving ripples of spacetime, called gravitational waves.

Geography is the branch of science concerned with identifying and describing places on Earth, utilizing spatial awareness to try to understand why things exist in specific locations.

Geostatistics apply statistical concepts to collected spatial data of Earth to create an estimate for unobserved phenomena.

Spatial planning is a method of regulating the use of space at land-level, with decisions made at regional, national and international levels.

The perception of surroundings is important due to its necessary relevance to survival, especially with regards to hunting and self preservation as well as simply one's idea of personal space.

The understanding of three-dimensional space in humans is thought to be learned during infancy using unconscious inference, and is closely related to hand-eye coordination.

Space has been studied in the social sciences from the perspectives of Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, urban theory and critical geography.

These theories account for the effect of the history of colonialism, transatlantic slavery and globalization on our understanding and experience of space and place.

[33] In his book Thirdspace, Edward Soja describes space and spatiality as an integral and neglected aspect of what he calls the "trialectics of being," the three modes that determine how we inhabit, experience and understand the world.