Part 1: The Foundation of Existence. Chapter 2. Space Is Never Empty

In many popular depictions, space is the ultimate form of silence. A black void, an endless plain without air, without sound, without disturbance. If there is anything we humans like to declare empty, it is space. But imagine an astronaut floating in the International Space Station, seemingly safe inside a metal cocoon high above Earth. Outside it is night, inside it is quiet. The Earth slides blue and silent past the window. And then, suddenly, something sounds that, at least in our minds, does not belong there: a soft tap, then another, irregular, almost casual, as if someone is tapping a fingernail against the hull.

What that astronaut hears is not imagination, and not a technical defect. It is tiny dust grains, microscopic fragments of stone or metal, little flecks of space debris striking the outer wall at enormous speed. One grain is nothing, but every tap is a reminder: even here, only about four hundred kilometres above Earth’s surface, where we are inclined to think the Earth has almost “ended”, space is anything but empty. Enough particles are still flying around to remind a human, quite literally and audibly, of the presence of matter.

For me, that is not a fun fact, but a key image. The astronaut on the ISS is surrounded by what, in everyday language, we would almost automatically call nothing. And yet there is dust, gas, charged particles, remnants of old satellites, micrometeorites, and a constant stream of light and radiation. Between the Earth and the Moon, and far beyond, there is no place where there is truly nothing. Only the scale and the visibility change. Where we see emptiness, we are in fact blind to what we do not spontaneously perceive.

That simplicity makes it philosophically interesting. We humans tend to label everything that falls below a certain threshold as nothing. What we do not feel, do not see, and cannot measure directly often vanishes, in our language, into the category of empty. But space corrects us in an almost pedagogical way. Even close to home, just outside our atmosphere, we find ourselves in a grainy environment. The taps on the ISS hull are audible proof that what we call empty is, in fact, simply a different density scale.

If that is already true in low Earth orbit, it is logical to ask what happens when we shift our gaze to the cosmos as a whole. Between galaxies there is tenuous gas, with lone atoms drifting about, and long filaments of diluted material stretching between clusters. In the vast spaces between those structures there are still photons, neutrinos, gravitational ripples, field fluctuations. The density is low, but never zero. There is always something that does something, however little. Space has structure, even when that structure is invisible to the human eye.

I see this as an ontological lesson. Emptiness is not a property of reality, but of our description. We stick the label empty on regions where signals drop below our sensitivity threshold, but the universe does not care about our thresholds. At every level there is texture, variation, movement. Where we see nothing, our measuring stick has often simply run out. What we experience as empty is, at most, a stage in which no recognizable forms remain for us, while the underlying fields and particles simply continue to exist.

From that thought, light suddenly becomes a very different kind of messenger. In the textbook picture, a ray of light shoots straight through perfectly empty space, interrupted only here and there by a star or a planet. In the picture I sketch here, that is impossible. Every dust grain and every wisp of gas, every dwarf galaxy, every filament, no matter how tenuous, has gravity. And gravity means curvature. Or rather, every particle curves space, and we experience that as gravity. Every tiny bit of mass bends a light path by a minuscul amount. Not spectacular, not dramatic, but real. You never notice one such deflection, but millions in a row add up.

You can compare it to a mountain road. If you know only the travel time and the constant speed, it looks as if the villages on either side are much farther apart than they really are. The car took a detour. The road wound. In cosmology we often pretend light takes a highway, a straight line through an empty plain, but in reality it is forced to follow a winding route past every little gravitational dip it encounters. As a result, the optical path, the route the light actually travels, becomes longer than the geometric distance between source and observer.

That has far reaching consequences. If, throughout our calculations, we assume straight lines in empty space while real space is a fine grained, gravitating soup, then we build our picture of the universe on the wrong kind of map. We measure a certain travel time, divide it by the speed of light, and obtain a distance. But that distance is, in fact, too large. We think the second village is farther away than it is. Exactly that mistake, only on a cosmic scale, runs like a red thread through my theory.

In my GLV worldview, which I will explore in more depth later in this book, this is not a minor detail but the core of the story. Space is never empty, so light is never unaffected. That means that almost everything we infer from light is saturated with optical distortion. The thickness of a cluster shell, the rotation speed at the outer edge of a galaxy, the apparent acceleration of cosmic expansion, all of it depends on the assumption that light is an honest, direct messenger. I argue that it is not. Light tells the truth, but always with an accent.

The astronaut on the ISS is not scenery in this story, but a guide. He or she makes audible that even where we expect silence, reality exerts influence. Every tap on the hull is evidence that space is a medium, not a void. On a cosmic scale, that translates into a universe in which light never does exactly what we assume in our formulas, but always has to take a slight detour. What we see, therefore, is not a one to one copy of what is.

At the end of this chapter I want to leave you with that one simple insight. If space is never empty and light never truly travels straight, then our picture of distances, speeds, and masses in the universe is not automatically reliable. The map can differ from the road at fundamental points. In the rest of this book I work out what happens when we take that thought seriously and consistently, how it leads to a zero point field as a foundation, a three sphere form of the universe, black holes as field resets, and a cosmos in which dark matter and dark energy may not be needed.