Below is the first draft of this article I had published this morning in The Conversation! A couple of days ago when my previous piece passed 100k reads in under a month, I teased that I’d post this one here soon. Yesterday I worked with Nehal El-Hadi, the Science + Technology Editor at The Conversation Canada, to polish and prepare it for publication. She’s a magician, and I’m thrilled with how it turned out.
In contrast to the earlier article — which wrestled with the many incoherent ideas people have about space-time’s “existence” and tried to sort out what can and can’t be true — this one takes a more principled approach. It starts from basic concepts and definitions and builds toward a much firmer (and bolder) conclusion: space-time simply cannot be reality, because it literally does not exist.
To put that result bluntly: it challenges the very foundation of a century of conceptual confusion in physics.
Enjoy — and please let me know what you think in the comments!
Whether space-time exists or not should neither be controversial nor even conceptually challenging, given the definitions of “space-time,” “events”, and “instants” — and what those mean in the context of how we think and talk about things that do exist. This is not an exotic proposal, but a matter of basic definition and fundamental concept. The idea that space-time is reality is no more viable than the old belief that the celestial sphere was reality: both are observer-centred models that are powerful and convenient for describing the world, but neither represents reality itself.
Yet from the standpoints of modern physics, philosophy, popular science communication, and familiar themes in science fiction, stating that space-time does not exist is indeed contentious. Ask an AI overview, “according to modern physics, does space-time exist?”, and you’ll get something like: “Spacetime exists as the interwoven fabric of space and time — a dynamic, four-dimensional continuum that bends and curves due to gravity.”
But what would it mean for a world to be like that — where everything that has ever happened or will happen somehow “exists” now as part of an interwoven fabric?
Think concretely. The moment you lost your first tooth — at some particular place on Earth while our planet orbited the Sun and our galaxy drifted through space — does that event “exist” now? Or consider a bad decision you wish you could undo, or the jolt of joy from an email with great news. It’s easy to picture these as “existing” somewhere. Fiction invites us to: time travellers alter events and disrupt the timeline, as if past and future events were locations you could visit if you had the right technology.
Philosophers often talk this way too. In the usual taxonomy, Eternalism says all events across all time exist; Growing Block says the past and present exist while the future will come to be; Presentism says only the present exists and the past/future did/will exist when they happen. And in general relativity, when we picture a four-dimensional continuum that bends and curves, we tend to imagine that continuum — and the events composing it — as really existing.
Each of these habits rests on a confusion about how we use the word “exist.” We’ve applied it uncritically to a mathematical description of happenings, where a different word fits better. To see why, we need the basics.
What is space-time?
In physics, space-time is the continuous set of events that happen throughout space and time — from here to the furthest galaxy, from the Big Bang to the far future. It is a four-dimensional map that records and measures where and when everything happens.
- An event is an instantaneous occurrence at a specific place and time.
- An instant is the three-dimensional collection of spatially separated events that happen “at the same time” (with relativity’s usual caveat that simultaneity can be frame-dependent).
- Space-time is the totality of all events that ever happen.
So space-time isn’t the stuff of the world — it’s not reality, and doesn’t exist in the way we normally think of space or objects within it as existing — it is our most powerful way of cataloguing the world’s happenings. That cataloguing is indispensable, but the words we use for it matter.
Look past your screen, two feet in front of you: every instant, as time continually passes, an event happens right there. In fact, infinitely many instants occur at that point in space during any span of time.
Now, scan your surroundings: there are infinitely many points in the three dimensions of space around you, and at every instant as time passes a unique event occurs at each location.
Is it fair to say these events happening around you exist? Do they even “exist” when and where they happen? Or is it more accurate to say that the location two feet in front of you exists, and that (probably uneventful) events continually “happen” there every instant?
In this sense, it is the atoms in the room with you, and the space between them, that exist, while instantaneous occurrences happen at every point.
The kinematics of space-time
Physicists describe a car travelling straight at constant speed with a simple space-time diagram: position on one axis, time on the other. Instants stack together to form a two-dimensional space-time. The car’s position is a point within each instant, and those points join to form a worldline — the full record of the car’s position throughout the time interval — whose slope is the car’s speed.
Real motion is far more complex. The car rides along on a rotating Earth orbiting the Sun, as the Sun orbits the Milky Way, as the Milky Way drifts through the local universe. Plotting the car’s position at every instant ultimately requires four-dimensional space-time. Your own life traces another such worldline, marking your location at every instant throughout your life, as you ride along on spaceship Earth.
None of this is conceptually difficult. Space-time is the map of where and when events happen. Your worldline is the record of every event that occurs throughout your own life. The key question is whether the map — or all the events it draws together at once — should be said to exist in the same way that cars, people, and the places they go exist.
Why shouldn’t space-time be said or thought to exist?
Consider what we ordinarily mean by “exist.” Chairs, rooms, computers, people, cities, planets, galaxies — these exist. They either are places or they occupy place, enduring there over intervals of time. They persist through changes and can be encountered repeatedly.
Think about the last time you took a test. The building existed. The desk existed. You existed. But what about the instant when an answer clicked in your head? Did that instant exist — or did it simply happen while you, the desk, the building, and the test all existed? The clicking was an occurrence within an existing world, fundamentally different from things like desks and buildings that do exist.
Treating occurrences as existing “things” smuggles confusion into our language and concepts. When analysing space-time, should we describe events, instants, worldlines, or even space-time as a whole as existing in the same sense as places and people? Or is it more accurate to say that events happen in an existing world? On that view, space-time is the map that records those happenings, allowing us to describe the spatial and temporal relationships between them.
Space-time does not exist
I propose: events do not — and should not be said to — exist. Consequently, space-time does not exist. Events happen everywhere throughout the course of existence, and the occurrence of an event is categorically different from the existence of anything — whether object, place, or concept. In support, I offer the following.
First, there is no empirical evidence that any past, present, or future event “exists” in the way that things in the world around us exist. Verifying the existence of (say) Hitler’s death as an ongoing object would require something like a time machine to go and observe it now. Even present events cannot be verified as existing things. We exist, and as we do, new events occur every instant of our lives. But we can never linger and observe them as ongoing existents.
In contrast, the desk you used for that exam existed. You could look at it, walk over to it, sit at it to take the test, and leave it behind when you were done. Time-travel paradoxes — and the near-miss stories that dramatise them — rest on the false premise that events exist as revisitable locations. Treat events as occurrences in an existing world — recognise the categorical difference between occurrence and existence — and the paradoxes evaporate.
Second, this recognition reframes the philosophy of time. Much debate over the past century has treated events as things that exist. Philosophers then focus on their tense properties: is an event past, present, or future? Did this one occur earlier or later than that one? These discussions implicitly smuggle in at the outset an assumption that events are existent things that bear these properties. From there, it’s a short step to the conclusion that time is unreal or that the passage of time is an illusion, on the identification that the same event can be labelled differently from different standpoints. But the ontological distinction was lost at the start: events don’t exist; they happen. Tense and order are features of how happenings relate within an existing world, not properties of existent objects.
Finally, consider how physicists talk. Relativity is a mathematical theory that describes a four-dimensional space-time continuum. It is not a theory about a four-dimensional thing that exists and, in the course of its own existence, bends and warps due to gravity. Physics has no variable for describing the “existence” of space-time itself, nor one to account for any change it might experience as an existing thing. That picture quietly puts space-time on the same footing as the three-dimensional world we intuitively understand to exist around us. We should resist that slide. Space-time provides a powerful description of how events happen: how they are ordered relative to one another, how sequences of events are measured to unfold and how lengths are measured in different reference frames.
None of this diminishes relativity’s mathematics or its extraordinary empirical success. Einstein’s equations remain intact. What changes is how we speak and think about what we are describing. If we stop saying that events (and space-time) exist, and instead say that events happen within an existing world — with space-time as the map of those happenings — we recover conceptual clarity without sacrificing a single prediction.
To say space-time doesn’t exist isn’t a move towards exotic physics; it’s a return to clarity.
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