But the point to be made is how I may be able to understand space as the context in which objects can exist an infinite set of three-dimensional locations which may be, in effect, empty or full of matter. However, if I am not mistaken, electrostatic repulsion between electrons in orbitals of adjacent atoms prevents those atoms from overlapping and thus they behave as if their mostly empty volumes were indeed full of matter, hence yielding the macroscopic effects that I can directly observe. Microscopically, however, it appears that most of those seemingly filled volumes are actually empty space, since most of the matter in each atom making up those things is confined to a tiny volume in its nucleus, and the rest is spanned (rather than occupied) by an ordered cloud of increasingly complex, negatively charged electron orbitals. For example, my body occupies a specific volume of space underneath which there is a volume occupied by my chair, and so on. Macroscopically, different regions (subsets of locations) may be "occupied" or "filled" with different material objects. I can understand the word "space" in different ways depending on the context in which it is used, but when I view itself as the context in which things exist, I understand it as an infinite set of three-dimensional locations, each described as a triplet of distances from a chosen reference point along three orthogonal axes. Please allow me to describe those concepts as I view them and the problems I find at combining them, in the hope that someone can point out my mistakes and help me understand the alluded question. That is surely because I am using the wrong notions for one or more of those concepts, but I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician (and not even a native English speaker, for that matter) so I am forced to resort to those notions as I understand them from my education and my day to day experience. I am trying to understand what it really means for spacetime to be curved, but I cannot figure out how to combine in my mind the notions of space, time and curvature in such a way that it makes sense. I am not sure whether this is a physics question, a maths question or even a linguistics question please forgive me if I have chosen the wrong platform.
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