Formerly, people thought that if matter disappeared from the universe, space and time would remain. Relativity declares that space and time would disappear with matter.
We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.
Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature's basic building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.
Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.
When you're falling through space time has no meaning.
It was Einstein who made the real trouble. He announced in 1905 that there was no such thing as absolute rest. After that there never was.
Time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions.
If the universe sprung into existence and then expanded exponentially, you get gravitational waves traveling through space-time. These would fill the universe, a pattern of echoes of the inflation itself.
Even in empty space, time and space still exist.
We'll have four different gravitational wave windows open within the next 20 years, and each of them will see something different. We'll be probing the birth of the universe with this. The so-called 'inflationary era' of the universe. We'll be probing the birth of the fundamental forces and how they came into being.
Every time we get a story that says there was a Big Bang, then people want to know what was before that. And if we find out, what was before that?
If our inconceivably ancient universe even had any beginning, the conditions determining that beginning must even now be engraved in the atomic weights.
In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.
Relativity can, for instance, explain that the universe had once been clumped into a dense fireball. But it can never explain how matter actually behaved.
And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.
We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive.
In spacetime, all events are baked together: a four-dimensional continuum. Past and future are no more privileged than left and right or up and down.
