Don't Panic

As mentioned by Douglas Adams in his science fiction/comedy tale "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", space is big. Last night I was looking up at the sky and I had to agree with him, it really is bloody big. In fact, as I looked around at it (at leat the bits I could see between the clouds and trees) I started to get a sense of just how really huge space is. Trust me on this, it is very, very big (take a look for yourself). Then I thought, hang on a sec, space is not something but is actually the absence of anything. It is in fact defined as the lack of any physical matter and thus how can I attribute any particular size to it, no matter how qualitative the definition? Surely logic dictates that 'space' doesn't exist and therefore can have no further attributes. Then it occurred to me that, although there is nothing physical to associate with 'space' as a concept it has a consistent property, that of absense of anything. Therefore, my reasoning went on, the dimensions I was considering were the distances between objects that do exist within 'space' and I was simply assigning these as properties of the 'space'. Although somewhat idiosyncratic, my thinking continued, I rationalised this was appropriate because of the relatively small proportion of matter in comparison to the 'space'. It then occured to me that perhaps the cheese I had just eaten was out of date.