Akani,

My interest and understanding of modern physics comes from about 4+ decades of reading popular books on it. One of the observations from that is the way these issues are framed over time tends to change. The bigger picture tends to fade into the background, as ever more focus is placed on the details and the current popular explanations for them.

Medium usually sends out an email, when someone replies, so this following comment was presumably from the first draft of your post;

“Think of it also like this: the fastest “absolute” clock in the universe would have to be one that is not moving when observed from all other frames simultaneously.”

Which is basically my point.

Remember that time “stops” when the frame is traveling at the speed of light. Logically then, the ruler goes to zero, as well. So take that in the opposite direction and ask what frame does that clock tick the fastest and has the longest ruler, if not the one in equilibrium with that vacuum, through which light travels at C.

Consider how many of the more recent books on physics argue that our physical reality essentially arises from “nothing.” So ask yourself, would this “nothing” correspond to the “vacuum” of space, through which light travels at C?

The understanding of space is that it is “three dimensional,” which is really just the xyz coordinate system and that is a mapping device and as such, descriptive, not explanatory. It would be like saying longitude, latitude and altitude are the fundamental basis of the biosphere of this planet.

People’s brains like clarity and nothing is more clear than mathematics, but math is a modeling of what we can see and measure. It is the map, not the territory. Epicycles were brilliant math/geometry for their day and actually more predictively accurate than the earliest heliocentric models. Yet the reason they were flawed wasn’t because every possible detail hadn’t been worked out, but because important factors hadn’t been included.