Albert Einstein

published his special theory of relativity, which led to the concept that space
and time can be viewed as a single construct known as spacetime. In this theory,
the speed of light in vacuum is the same for all observers—which has the result
that two events that appear simultaneous to one particular observer will not be
simultaneous to another observer if the observers are moving with respect to one
another. Moreover, an observer will measure a moving clock to tick more slowly than
one that is stationary with respect to them; and objects are measured to be
shortened in the direction that they are moving with respect to the observer.

Einstein worked on

a general theory of relativity, which is a theory of how gravity interacts with

spacetime. Instead of viewing gravity as a force field acting in spacetime,
Einstein suggested that it modifies the geometric structure of spacetime itself.
[24] According to the general theory, time goes more slowly at places with lower
gravitational potentials and rays of light bend in the presence of a gravitational
field. Scientists have studied the behaviour of binary pulsars, confirming the
predictions of Einstein's theories, and non-Euclidean geometry is usually used to
describe spacetime.

For broader coverage of this topic, see Space (mathematics).

In modern mathematics spaces are defined as sets with some added structure. They
are frequently described as different types of manifolds, which are spaces that
locally approximate to Euclidean space, and where the properties are defined
largely on local connectedness of points that lie on the manifold. There are
however, many diverse mathematical objects that are called spaces. For example,
vector spaces such as function spaces may have infinite numbers of independent
dimensions and a notion of distance very different from Euclidean space, and
topological spaces replace the concept of distance with a more abstract idea of
nearness.

Second law of motion

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Space is one of the few fundamental quantities in physics, meaning that it cannot
be defined via other quantities because nothing more fundamental is known at the
present. On the other hand, it can be related to other fundamental quantities.
Thus, similar to other fundamental quantities (like time and mass), space can be
explored via measurement and experiment.

Today, our three-dimensional space is viewed as embedded in a four-dimensional

spacetime, called Minkowski space (see special relativity). The idea behind
spacetime is that time is hyperbolic-orthogonal to each of the three spatial
dimensions.

Relativity
Main article: Theory of relativity

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Before Albert Einstein's work on relativistic physics, time and space were viewed
as independent dimensions. Einstein's discoveries showed that due to relativity of
motion our space and time can be mathematically combined into one object–spacetime.
It turns out that distances in space or in time separately are not invariant with
respect to Lorentz coordinate transformations, but distances in Minkowski space
along spacetime intervals are—which justifies the name.

In addition, time and space dimensions should not be viewed as exactly equivalent
in Minkowski space. One can freely move in space but not in time. Thus, time and
space coordinates are treated differently both in special relativity (where time is
sometimes considered an imaginary coordinate) and in general relativity (where
different signs are assigned to time and space components of spacetime metric).

Furthermore, in Einstein's general theory of relativity, it is postulated that

spacetime is geometrically distorted – curved – near to gravitationally significant
masses.[25]

One consequence of this postulate, which follows from the equations of general
relativity, is the prediction of moving ripples of spacetime, called gravitational
waves. While indirect evidence for these waves has been found (in the motions of
the Hulse–Taylor binary system, for example) experiments attempting to directly
measure these waves are ongoing at the LIGO and Virgo collaborations. LIGO
scientists reported the first such direct observation of gravitational waves on 14
September 2015.[26][27]