Planck's Constant (was something else)

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>TILL

>I am certainly no physicist, but this has puzzled me too.  Physicists say

>that space was created with the big bang, but what was the singularity

>before the big bang existing in if there was no space.  Furthermore, if no

>matter existed, why wouldn't space, the "stuff" that surrounds matter,

>exist?  If one traveled through space, would he ever reach a place where

>there is no space to travel in, even if he reached a point where no more

>matter thrown out from the big bang existed?  If so, what would happen?

>Would he crash into some kind of wall?  If so, what would the wall be made of?

>

>In other words, I'm asking if space is not just the absence of matter.  If

>there were no matter, wouldn't there still have to be space, so if space is

>"something," would it not be true that it just isn't possible for nothing to

>exist?  The universe is expanding, so what is it expanding into if it isn't

>expanding into space that necessarily exists where there is no matter?



ADNAN
An answer from the "Ask the Space Scientist"
http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry//ask/askmag.html

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If the universe is expanding into nothingness, isn't 'Nothingness' something? 

Yes and no. 
The universe is expanding, but the only theory that describes how this
works is Einstein's Theory of General Relativity developed in 1915. Because
this theory has been tested and found to hold up well, at least for the
kinds of data we have access to, we have to trust what it says about the
universe too...at least for now. GR, like so many of the other working
theories we have about different aspects of nature ( quantum mechanics,
special relativity and so on) are very hard for humans to work with because
you cant use good-old human intuition to anticipate if their answers 'make
sense' or not. 
When general relativity says that 'space stretches', we are left with a
whole gaggle of human intuition problems just like the one you posed in
this question. Big Bang cosmology is based on General Relativity, and there
are two kinds of universes described by it. Closed-finite universes and
open-infinite ones. In the closed universe ( which ours seems not to be
according to the data we have) 
3-d space is finite in volume at every instant, and in the far future, the
eventual collapse will decrease this volume to zero and then there will be
no more 3-d space in existence. General relativity says that there is no
'external space' in which our universe exists, so human intuition fails
miserably. Human intuition DEMANDS that there exist an external space for
our universe to 'float' in like a soap bubble, which is the physical
analogy your mind is using anyway to understand the universe. In an
open-infinite universe, 3-d space has ALWAYS been infinite, even at the
'birth' of the universe at the Big Bang. This model is favored by
Inflationary Cosmology, in which our universe is just one of an infinite
number of 'patches' of 3-d space that exist in some larger arena. The
expansion of out particular patch, however, does not happen at the expense
of the compaction of the space surrounding it. Again, this is an intuitive
paradox that humans cannot resolve because it seems contradictory...though
mathematically it derives from a higher logic than we are commonly familiar
with in our limited world. 

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