ABOUT SPACE
ABOUT SPACE Debates concerning the nature, essence and the mode of existence of space date back to antiquity; namely, to treatises like the Timaeus of Plato , or Socrates in his reflections on what the Greeks called i n the Physics of Aristotle in the definition of topos or in the later "geometrical conception of place" as "space qua extension" in the Discourse on Place of the 11th-century Arab polymath Alhazen . Many of these classical philosophical questions were discussed in the Renaissance and then reformulated in the 17th century, particularly during the early development of classical mechanics . In Isaac Newton 's view, space was absolute in the sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there was any matter in the space. Other natural philosophers , notably Gottfried Leibniz , thought instead that space wa...