World of Science

The term universe signifies the totality of space, time and matter. Modern physical science has discovered that matter has no independent existence but can be reduced to the ultimate constitution of the space-time manifold. Ordinarily, space is conceived as extendedness with three dimensions, and time as a consciousness of the succession of events in space. Thus, common perception makes an empirical distinction between space and time. But scientists like Minkowski, Einstein and Eddington have tried to demonstrate and prove that every event in the universe has a four-dimensional character. What we perceive is not space and time but a space-time continuum. Matter itself is found to owe its origin to a particular feature discoverable in the space-time manifold. A kink or twist or curvature in space-time is said to be responsible for the appearance of what is commonly called matter. The nature of this curvature is dependent upon the quality and the amount of matter that it contains. The greater the matter, the greater is the curvature. And this curvature it is that goes by the name of gravitational force.
Philosophers like Kant denied any externality to space and viewed it as a necessary mode of objective perception, a special condition of the sensibility. Space, however, is not a creation of any individual mind, for all perceptions are contained in it, though it is possible for us to believe that space may be a mode of perception by a cosmic mind. In these days, there is a tendency to reduce perceptual space to certain kinds of relationship between bodies, to position,distance and direction. Even these relations are external, objective and real to all perceiving minds and are not the creations of any particular mind. Space, thus, becomes a cosmic factor necessary for the perception of things by all minds.
Time appears as an element very necessary in the understanding of any event completely. It is not enough if we merely understand the three dimensions—right and left, up and down, far and near—related to an object or event. We also require to know, in addition to these factors, a fourth dimension—succession in terms of before and after. Such temporal succession in space is called time, and due to the peculiar manner of the reaction of our minds to events that occur in space in what we call succession, we are made to create a distinction between past, present and future. The succession is really continuous, and no genuine demarcation can be made in it. But, on account of the play of our minds in the form of sense-perception, memory and imagination, such a threefold distinction is made in the passage of time. In fact, the present is only a concept. It does not exist as distinguished from the past and the future. In actual practice the present turns out to be the subtle concept of an infinitesimal part of the succession of events, which directly appears as a content of sense-experience. The past has an infinite history and the future has infinite possibilities. The present fades away either to eternity or to nothingness.
Space, time and matter, however, have a common origin which contains all these in a unified and homogeneous form in what is designated today as the space-time continuum. The Newtonian conception of absolute space and absolute time with localised bodies in them has been abandoned, and the concept of gravitation itself has undergone a new orientation. Matter is fast losing its solidity and evaporating into an indescribable energy which is now considered to be the matrix of the universe. According to Einstein and his followers, the ultimate physical reality of the universe is space-time. The inequalities, the twists, the curved nature of space-time constitute the visible matter. This means that matter can be reduced to energy and the space-time manifold. Newton’s theory that material bodies are drawn out of the straight line which would be their natural course of motion, in the direction of other material bodies by a peculiar force called gravitation, has been now supplanted by the discovery that no such force does exist, that bodies are not pulled in that way, but that what is called the gravitational force is a peculiar curvature of space around bodies of matter. The path of any material body in the region of this curvature is determined only by this curvature, and not by any other force called gravitation.
The stable universe of Newton has disappeared into a cosmos of relativity with space-time as its ultimate basis, constructed out of lines of force and intervals of events. There are no objects, only events; no points of space, only waves of energy. The visible universe is, therefore, not the real one. In the hands of the modern physicist the real universe becomes a supersensible object. We are given, instead of a hard, tangible and visible universe with the qualities conveyed to us by our senses, a universe of  mathematical point-events, symbols, which in the end clamour for being reduced to nothing but thought. To James Jeans, the universe is a construction of a cosmic mathematical mind, which may be called God; and to Arthur Eddington, the universe is of the stuff of a cosmic mind or consciousness. An enquiry into the ultimate reality of the physical universe has ended practically in a negation of it by the most advanced scientists of today, and in a return to mind and consciousness as its reality. Physics has landed itself in metaphysics, and the scientist has become a philosopher. Matter is slowly disclosing its essential psychical and spiritual being..