What is space? Is it what is conceived by Newton or by Leibniz? Both Newtonian and Leibnizian views of space are framed under the mechanistic thinking of Descartes back to the 17th century. Christopher Alexander in his life's work - The Nature of Order conceived and developed a brilliant new view of space: space is neither lifeless nor neutral, but a living structure capable of being more living or less living. This new view of space has some far-reaching implications. It implies that we make space or our built environment better, smarter, or more sustainable, or more livable, or more resilient. More importantly, it implies that goodness of space is a matter of fact rather than an opinion. In this paper, we attempted to provide empirical evidence space indeed has different degree of beauty or life:
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By asking this question, what I really wanted to know how long it will take for us to adopt Alexandrine view of space. Benoit Mandelbrot said Euclidean shapes are cold and dry, but nature, traditional buildings and artifacts are full of living structures, as noted by Christopher Alexander.
Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction
No one knows exactly how big space is. The difficulty arises because of what we can see in our detectors. We measure long distances in space in "light-years," representing the distance it takes for light to travel in a year (roughly 5.8 trillion miles, or 9.3 trillion kilometers).
As time passes, man's concept of space will continue to increase and change. I should imagine that by the time any new knowledge has been made available, it will then have been surpassed by further findings.
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