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Radical New Notions of Empty Space
Our conception of the most fundamental layer of existence in modern science, mathematics and philosophy became vastly richer in the Nineteenth Century
Figure 1: The Magnificent Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302 in Scorpius, between three and four thousand light years hence. Nearby objects in our galaxy are close enough to suffer a lack of nearby stellar candles but beyond the reach of Stellar Parallax ranging methods, so they are very hard to range accurately, hence the large uncertainty here. The Butterfly Nebula is one of the most complicated structures ever observed in astronomy and its central white dwarf is one of the hottest known at a temperature 250 000K, implying that the original star must have been gargantuan in size.
We saw in the last article how in the last two thousand years, through the observations of Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Indian, Nigerian and Greek astronomers, philosophers and mathematicians, our species has become aware in ever more precise ways of the "empty space" that surrounds us, holds the air that nurtures us with breath and rain and, further afield, the Sun that sources all life on our Earth and stretches as far as we can see with our telescopes using light and electromagnetic radiations of all kinds, as well as now gravitational waves…
