What Is Space? (1961)

these radio antennas called dishes are aimed at distant Stars radio signals that originate like static far out in space cause the sound you were hearing the moving Needle on the graph is making a record of radio signals received from distant Stars this is space but there is also space close by you need space to sit down you need space to stand up you need space to lie down you need space to run in fact every everything you do takes space of course there are times when it seems that there is empty space but even when things are crowded there's usually plenty of space close by let's take a trip away from the earth and find out how much space there is we can start our trip away from the the Earth aboard a helicopter then we'll change to a rocket and then we'll switch to imagination backed up by knowledge man has collected about space we have to travel some 240,000 mil through space away from the Earth before we meet another object in space the moon now we're millions of miles away from the earth we have to travel about 93 million miles away from the earth before we meet the next closest object in space the Sun now we're about 23 trillion miles away from the earth the earth is too small to be seen from here the sun itself is little brighter than the other stars and here is our next nearest Neighbor In Space the star Proxima centori actually we have hardly even begun our trip through space as we move farther from the earth we find that Proxima centori and our sun are only two stars in a great collection of stars this collection of stars is called a Galaxy there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and in space there are billions of galaxies here is a Galaxy similar to ours as photographed through a telescope it's located nearly 2 million light years away from the earth a light year is a measure of distance not time it's the distance light can travel in a year that distance is about 6 trillion miles the most distant Galaxy we can see through our existing telescopes is about 6 million light years away from the earth and there's no reason to believe that space doesn't extend farther than that so you can see that there's a great deal of space I wonder have we explored all the space there is for example how about the space in that rock you're sitting on the Rock seems solid but does that mean that there's no space in it this container is filled solid with marbles but does that mean there's no space in it there's plenty of space for some BB's the BB's fit into the space between the marbles is there any space left in the container now yes there's space for some water the water fits into the space between the BB's now the container seems to be filled solid it seems that there is no more space in it but is that really true the two small bottles are filled with water it's colored to make it easier to see the bottles are filled full to these lines the two small bottles filled to their lines fill the large bottle to its line now one bottle is filled with colored water and the other with alcohol where did that space come from it must have come from space inside the water or the alcohol there must be some space inside these materials otherwise they would have filled the big bottle how about the space between things for example the space between these boys playing catch is that space empty not exactly there are baseballs passing through it let's get that out there hey how about the space between this search light and the place where its light hits is that space empty no it's filled with light heat travels from the Sun down to us and to get here it travels through 93 million miles of space the radio signals that make this static have traveled through billions of light years of space to reach this monitoring station on Earth what if someday somewhere an antenna aimed at a distant star picked up a signal like this [Applause] what would such a signal coming from far out in space [Applause] mean would it be static [Applause]