Even trying to describe space feels challengingShutterstockFastMotion One of the most awkward parts of writing a book is that, eventually, authors have to ask people for blurbs the endorsements that you see on the cover of a book, encouraging you to buy it. I am now in this phase with The Edge of Space-Time.
Im writing to people and asking them to read my book and send me some nice words about it, in exchange for nothing but my goodwill. Its a bit nerve-wracking, but it can also be interesting.
One person whose endorsement will become public later sent in their blurb with a query: why did I choose space-time with a hyphen rather than spacetime? Read moreThe radical idea that space-time remembers could upend cosmology This sounds like its just grammar, but something else is lurking. When we talk about space or time separately, we have some intuitive sense of what we are talking about.
Space-time or spacetime is relatively new to the scientific vocabulary. Even though, throughout history, many cultures have had unified concepts that dont separate space and time, as a profession, physics conceived of them as distinct for longer than we have understood them to be unified.
*Reporting by Newscientist.*
Should it be space-time or spacetime – and why does it matter anyway?
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