2005-04-16: Space: What is it really?

[Robert]

This next chat session will be held on Saturday, April 16th at 4:00pm Central Standard Time (CST) also known as (GMT-6). You can use the timezone converter to check your local time. Once you're at the timezone website, just enter the day and time as specified above, then select US/Central in the "From Time Zone" column and your own location in the "To Time Zone" column, then click Convert. This will give you the time of the chat meeting in your own local time.

This will be our second official ToeQuest chat session. The last chat session was about a month ago and we had two participants. Hope to get a few more people involved this time. Once traffic picks up I'll have these chat sessions on a weekly basis using alternating times so more members can participate.

The topic for this next chat session is...

Space: What is it really?

The topic is just to get the ball rolling. I expect that the discussion will branch off into other areas and that's fine. Members may create their own chat rooms if they wish to stick with a specific topic.

Some questions to ponder when preparing for the chat session:

1. Can space ever really be empty?
2. How does space expand?
3. What are the properties of expanding space? contracting space?
4. What does space expand into?
5. Can space be viewed from a higher dimensional perspective?
6. What is the fundamental constituent of space?
7. Is space an illusion created by our senses. Is space real?
8. What are the properties of space and why do these change in the macroscopic and the quantum scales.
9. What does it mean for space to be warped?
10. How is space related to time? Can space exist without time? Can there be time without space?

I'll post the first couple of hours of the chat session, as a downloadable text file to this thread, for future reference.

Please post your pre-chat comments to this thread. If there are areas relating to the posted topic that you would like to discuss, you might mention them here. Any future chat room topic suggestions should go to the suggestions thread. Also, remember to review the Chat Room Guidelines thread before engaging in Chat.

Regards,
--Robert

[force5]

Hi Robert;

One of my favorite topics. Hope there's a good turn-out.

John

[Guille]

I am waiting for the chat sesion. The more of us, the better.


I am only going to write this before:

I think many of the properties that we give to space are making space becoming a complex and abstract concept compared to the such-a-basic concept and eas to understand it used to be.

[Guille]

The chat session was ok, but it's a shame only me, omni, and sometimes Robert writing. But we did touch many of the themes about space, time, the beggining of the universe, and the expansion of space.

[Omni]

401 members...3 members and Robert present..2 members and Robert chatting...could it be chatting isn't the fav thing to do at our forum? Maybe not many knew about it? It's certainly ashame, because when you have more participants you can get a good discussion with many different points of view. Maybe next time members can sign in on the chat so we know beforehand how many know about it/come.

[Guille]

401 members...3 members and Robert present..2 members and Robert chatting...could it be chatting isn't the fav thing to do at our forum? Maybe not many knew about it? It's certainly ashame, because when you have more participants you can get a good discussion with many different points of view. Maybe next time members can sign in on the chat so we know beforehand how many know about it/come.

yes. Maybe a PM could be send to each of us, telling us when at what about each chat. I know it's much work, but copy paste helps in this time.

[Omni]

Maybe just send an invitation by mail on which you can respond if you'll join.

[Robert]

I'm considering sending out an email announcement for the next chat session. That would be easy to do. I've hesitated about doing this in the past just to keep the mail to members at a minimum. There's nothing I hate more than unwelcome email, but I think I'll give this approach a try for next time. Members can always opt out of receiving email.

For the next chat session I'm considering the same or similar theme. I'll probably schedule it for two weeks from today, on May 30 or April 1st, at near the same time. Just let me know if you have any more ideas to improve the chat meeting for next time. Also, how did the chat room work for you? Any suggestions for improving the chat room itself are also welcome.

Thanks for your participation. I'll try and do a better job of promoting the chat meeting for next time so we can have a few more participants.

Regards,
--Robert

[Guille]

Robert,

I did like how the chat worked.

Maybe giving a bigger space to the writing part for posts in the chat would help, because sometimes one whant's to read what he's written espècially if it's much.

[Robert]

You may have noticed in the last chat session that I did modify the input field so that it will expand or shrink depending on the size of your chat window. I tried a multi-line input field, but that causes a return to go to the next line instead of posting the message which is not what people expect so I gave up on that. The expanding input field should help.