Space-Time as Substance (2)

In a Nature article (here), space-time is treated as if it were a material medium — something that can stretch, curve, or even dissolve under the right conditions. The metaphors shift easily between fabric, container, and substance, as though space-time were a kind of cosmic stuff. This imagery makes it possible to speak of “tearing” or “emerging” space-time, as though it were woven cloth or molten fluid.

But space-time is not a thing. It is a schema of relation, a way of ordering events through symbolic architecture. To construe it as a substance confuses a model for a medium, reifying an abstraction into a kind of cosmic fabric. This is a category error: mistaking the coordinates of description for the material of reality.

Relationally, what we call space-time is an instantiated perspective on potential orderings — a way of cutting events relative to one another. It is not “out there” waiting to be curved or torn. Instead, it is a symbolic scaffolding through which phenomena are construed and aligned.

The effect of treating space-time as substance is to naturalise the model as reality. The imagery of fabric, curvature, and emergence not only obscures the symbolic cut but also installs a false ontology: that the universe consists of a malleable medium we can peer into and manipulate.

A relational ontology resists this temptation. Space-time is not a material container of being, but a patterned construal of relation. To take the metaphor of substance literally is to weave our own cloth and mistake it for the cosmos.