Isaac Newton had this theory about space and it's absoluteness. He thought that space was basically a giant grid. And objects could be seen to be moving by their change of coordinates basically. It's really not that bad of an idea. Granted, he was eventually shown to be incorrect and now we even know that space itself is moving-sort of. Expanding would be a better word for it.
That concept just blows my mind. How can space, the areas of life that we perceive as empty, be expanding. Scientifically I have fewer issues understanding the concept. The emptiness isn't really empty. On earth it's full of air which is more of a fluid than anything else (next time someone complains that they can't swim remind them that they're constantly swimming in air and watch for the slow reaction of realization). Outside earth space is still filled-sparsely-with molecules, elements and who knows really what else, dark matter maybe. Aside from the obvious issues with scientists not coming up with interesting names ('dark' matter? really?), I tend to run into a conceptual issue with the word 'space'.
For English speakers and likely most of those of Western Europeans ideological descent space is the absence of everything else. At least that's the first reaction typically. It's what is out past that big blue sky. The eternity of nothingness. At least that's what we can perceive with the naked eye. No optical or radio telescopes to assist. Not even a sextant to guide us like Brahe and Havelius in their recordings. How do we understand our universe then?
Perspective.
It's not going to be particularly useful for modern science, but for philosophical exercise and understanding the world it's wonderful. Perspective gives us everything we need. Motion, reference for distance, the ability to place something into our world view. For space it gives us everything we typically need to think about. When we're driving we can judge relative direction and velocity. When we're walking we can gauge how long it's going to to probably take to get somewhere. Riding a bike it let's us anticipate our turns. Sure it's more complicated in our minds when we're collecting and processing the data, but for the most part simple perspective gives us all the information we need.
So Newton wasn't that far off. He had telescopes and ways to record the information, but he still needed perspective. He could still figure out how objects moved. We run into trouble when two objects were moving in the same velocity and direction without anything else to use as reference, and when something was moving at the same velocity and direction, but even general thinking allowed us to sort that out. It becomes more imprecise and with large distances it becomes even more difficult.
Think of it like the beginning of the movie Contact. There's no Jodi Foster in it, just the earth being rapidly zoomed away from in the images passing us by. Smaller and smaller the Earth gets, Mars flies by, Jupiter is there and gone before we blink twice. They become dots. Tiny little dots that aren't any bigger than the dust particles floating around in the air when they catch the light coming in through the window. To even claim some absolute grid of space implies omniscience. Sure, it does the trick, but at the end of the day, we don't know even a millionth of a percent of all there is to know in the universe. And I made that number up, because at the end of the day, without some perspective we can get lost. I'm sorting out what's important to me, and all the space in between, well, it just became relative.
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