Dmill1220, this reminds me of the age-old debate involving Relationist theories that Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz argued for. The following is from Brian Green's The Fabric Of The Cosmos.
Quote:
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... Leibniz, who was Newton's contemporary, firmly believed that space does not exist in any conventional sense. Talk of space, he claimed, is nothing more than an easy and convenient way of encoding where things are relative to one another. Without the objects in space, Leibniz declared, space itself has no independent meaning or existence. Think of the English asphabet. It provides an order for twenty-six letteres - it provides relations such as a is next to b, d is six letters before j, x is three letters after u, and so on. But without the letters, the alphabet has no meaning - it has no "supra-letter," independent existence. Instead, the alphabet comes into being with the letters whose lexicographic relations it supplies. Leibniz claimed that the same is tre for space: Space has no meaning beyond providing the natural language for discusssing the relationship between on object's location and another. According to Leibniz, if all object were removed from space -- if space were completely empty -- it would be as meaningless as an alphabet that's missing its letters.
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As I understand it, this view is still currently held by some, and may even be enoying a come-back, of a sort, with the expansion of ideas like the Holographic principle wherein what you and I experience, sense, detect, measure, etc. is merely illusion and that there is some bounding entity that is producing all those effects with some kind of holographic process. The question seems to boil down to whether space and time actually exist in and of themselves - whether spacetime is a 'something' or a 'nothing'. And whether space is absolute or 'relative'. Other theories currently popular seem to be heading in the direction that space may be absolute, in a sense returning to the idea behind the aether of space that was proposed so long ago and then discarded as quite invalid by the time Einstein came along.
Admittedly, I haven't studied this kind of stuff to be any kind of expert on it, but it is interesting nonetheless to me.
