The fabric returns

Ten years after declaring space empty, Einstein found that it was not.

General Relativity, published in 1915, describes gravity as the curvature of spacetime. Matter bends the geometry of the cosmos, and planets follow its curved contours. RSI asks the simple question this raises: how can nothing be bent?

Einstein addressed this himself. In his 1920 lecture at Leiden he said: "We may say that according to the general theory of relativity, space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether." He was careful to distinguish this from the mechanical Aether that Michelson and Morley had failed to find. Yet something fills space, something bends, and something ripples.

Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life searching for a unified field theory. In 1949 he wrote that the theory of relativity leaves the question of the constitution of matter unanswered. The narrative suggests that what he was searching for, without a name for it, was the Eternal Consonance.

In 2015, LIGO detected gravitational waves from two black holes colliding far across the universe. The fabric of space was shown to vibrate and to carry information at the speed of light. For RSI, this is the medium announcing itself.