One Hundred Thousand Reads: How a Big Idea About Space-Time Found a Big Audience

I wrote something that’s been read a hundred thousand times!

That would be a big deal for me no matter what, but in this particular case it’s actually an even bigger deal in so many ways that I just want to take a moment to celebrate and explain.

First, in terms of numbers alone, my article in The Conversation that reached a hundred thousand reads today is only the twelfth (of 244) by anyone at the University of Saskatchewan to have been read that many times.

But even at that, of the eleven others, only four have reached that milestone within a month of publication (as mine did): two COVID-19 vaccine explainers from April and June 2021, an article about discovering grizzly, black, and polar bears together for the first time, and one about a landmark canine rights case in Brazil that was picked up by g1 — the news portal of Grupo Globo, Brazil’s largest media conglomerate (think BBC News or CNN as English equivalents).

In contrast, my article is not tied to any significant event. It’s about the nature of space-time — something physicists and philosophers have discussed and debated for over a hundred years. One might imagine everything interesting that can be said on the topic has already been said — and by far more famous people than me. And generally, when I’ve tried submitting my work to physics and philosophy journals, academic publishers, and news outlets, everything I’ve written on the subject before this particular article has been dismissed as such.

Yet this article has seen unprecedented readership, becoming the first Conversation article written by anyone at USask on a topic of perennial interest — rather than a news-driven event — to reach a hundred thousand reads in under a month.

The Conversation’s open publication model helped significantly. In the past month, like all the highly read articles I’ve compared to, my article has been republished by other outlets that enhanced its visibility. Within days it was republished by Phys.org, then a week later under a different title by EarthSky, and then only a week ago with yet another title by SciTechDaily.

Additionally, The Conversation has translated and republished my article in Portuguese, and a French translation should be published soon.

Of all of these, the engagement on SciTechDaily has been the best — possibly thanks to their title change: “Does Space-Time Really Exist?” as opposed to my original “What, exactly, is space-time?” There’s also been some wonderful comment engagement there — both positive and (initially) negative. My favourite so far is this one from QRP513:

“Beautiful job explaining the concepts and choke-points. This is a masterpiece of a post.”

What an amazing thing for someone to say!

And that takes me to the second, deeper reason why this particular article being so widely read means so much to me: it covers a topic that I think has generally been very badly misunderstood — and not by the general public, but by physicists and philosophers. This is not simply an explainer — it alludes to what I think are significant conceptual problems in the community that, frankly, I believe are holding us back from a better understanding of our universe. Because my views on the fundamental concepts of physics are so controversial, until this article I’ve mostly encountered resistance from editors.

(In fact, I received a very courteous email from Aeon today — the very day my Conversation piece hit 100k views — letting me know that my work isn’t the right fit for them right now. Hopefully someday that will change, but the timing was ironic.)

When I first pitched the Conversation article two months before publication, I heard back fairly quickly and the editor suggested she’d try to work through it before Canada Day (July 1). But then, after hearing nothing for most of the summer, I feared it had been rejected as too controversial — that it points too directly at the incoherence I personally see in the current understanding of physics — and that it was destined for the bin. Then, about a week before publication, I finally heard back, was asked to make a few minor revisions, and it went live the following Sunday.

The response since then has been incredibly affirming and reassuring.

Because let me be clear: events don’t exist — they happen.
Reality — our universe, and everything in it — exists. Every instant that every particle exists, an event happens. The idea that events themselves “exist” conflates two fundamentally distinct things: the things that do exist in our universe, and the events that occur as those things exist.

In contrast, philosophers often use the term “becoming” to describe the “coming into existence of events,” debating whether there can be objective truth about whether events are past, present, or future. But all of this treats events as existing entities — like you or me, or the space that separates us from the Sun — when in fact they are occurrences.

Based on feedback I’ve received on this article, I’ve drafted a follow-up that I’ll post soon here on my blog. It takes a step back and starts from the basic definitions, connecting them to physics and everyday experience. In a sense, it takes a more pedestrian approach to the problem discussed in the Conversation piece, one that I hope will be easier for friends and family to follow.

But then it goes a step further: rather than simply asking whether space-time really exists, it argues directly that space-time can’t be reality — because it literally does not exist.

And after that, I plan to publish another piece dealing directly with relativity through intuitive and universally comprehensible concepts, explaining why I think Einstein fundamentally misunderstood the meaning of relativity — what it basically implies for simultaneity, motion, space, and time. I believe physics has gone down a century-long rabbit hole as a result, with most physicists now imagining incoherent things as truth — like “space-time exists.”

I’m hopeful that these follow-up articles might be picked up again by major science outlets like The Conversation, Phys.org, EarthSky, and SciTechDaily. These questions really matter — and I think it’s time we faced the incoherence in our concepts and corrected the century-old mistakes that led us here.