Literally, what is space? The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light bc new space is being created. What is being created? Free of any atoms, photons, molecules, compounds, everything, what is the nothing which is something that houses all the aforementioned particles?
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Space is the emptiness between objects. Space isn’t being “created” insomuch as that objects are drifting further apart.
It’s pretty much nothing. It’s more like the area ‘between’ every ‘thing’ is getting a little bit bigger. Like two ballons slowly drifting apart. It’s just that the ‘things’ (galaxies, planets, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, etc.) in the universe are drifting away from each other, at different rates depending on the scale of the measured ‘thing’.
Imagine the universe is expanding at a rate of 1millimeter per meter per hour.
If you are 1meter away from an object, in one hour it will be 1millimeter away. If you are 10meters away, in that same hour it will be a full centimeter away. If you are 10,000meters away from something it will be a full meter away by the end of the hour.
So, in the same hour that you were waiting, the closer object is almost imperceptibly further away, while something much further away is a full meter further away.
Eventually, with enough distance, you reach a point where there are so many little 1millimeter spaces being added that even light couldn’t cross the distance.
That’s how the universe can expand faster than light can travel.
Also there isn’t *really* any such thing as ’empty space’. There’s this stuff called ‘quantum foam’ which permeates everything in the universe. Essentially it’s particles of matter and antimatter spontaneously appearing from nothing then immediately annihilating each other (this is what’s responsible for the Black Holes dissolving through Hawking Radiation) It’s helpful here to consider that the planetary atomic model we learned in school is wrong. An atom isn’t a ball with other balls circling it. It’s more of a field of probably in which the subatomic particles *might* be found if measured.
The associated electrons *might* be somewhere in that field or it might be in some other corner of the universe, but more than likely it’s somewhere in that field. Still, it’s not a physical thing you could ever ‘touch’, it’s a field, an area of potential. That’s what a Bose-Einstein condensate is. When matter is cooled to as close to Absolute Zero as we can possibly get, those ‘fields of probability’ kind of dissolve and become one ‘unit’. They don’t exactly inhabit the same physical space, but trying to measure them independently becomes a fruitless task as they are, temporarily, inexorably linked in a way that nothing else in the universe can be.
Probably raise more questions than it answer, but I figured you were looking for a mind blowing/stoner answer lolz. Hope you found some of it interesting.
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