Does space exist?

[DMattMooney]

Have recently read Smolin's book "The Life of the Cosmos". In discussing his reaction to quantum entanglement, he says he eventually decided that space is an illusion, and that all particles in the universe are somehow in contact. He points out that physicists have long understood that there is no absolute space, contrary to what Newton thought, but just a set of relationships. So going somewhat beyond Smolin, I would theorize that God could take all the relationships we experience as space and recode them into correlations within a single immensely complex function that depends only on time, and a hypothetical intelligent observer existing as a component of this function could do the equivalent of looking around him/herself and experiencing space.
"There is another theory, which states that this has already happened." - Douglas Adams

[wendy]

I know about this, it frightens me.

[DMattMooney]

Clarification: when I said: "existing as a component of", I meant a Fourier component; actually, a set of them. I am now wondering if "Laplace moment" is a more promising building block for our hypothetical observer.

[DMattMooney]

I thought of a cool way you could re-code a 4-D space-time into just a time function: by making a hologram of a hologram of a hologram, with one dimension of space being lost at each step. Holographic ideas are well-established in cosmology as the result of the work of 't Hooft and Susskind. A black hole, which some physicists think is a daughter universe to ours, has been shown to have all its information content on the surface, that is, on the event horizon. (In what follows, time will be excluded from the count of dimensions.) The holographic principle states that the horizon is a 2-D holographic representation of all the (3-D) matter that has ever fallen into the hole. So - if you can eliminate one spatial dimension in this way ... why not keep going? If the 2-D horizon is the first hologram, then the 1-D axis of rotation of the hole is the second hologram, and the 0-D gravitational singularity at the center is the third hologram.
But how could a pure time function represent any spatial relationships? You only have its instantaneous value. Does this value have a tremendous number of significant digits? Or do the harmonics, poles, and zeros that the function breaks down into when Fourier or Laplace transformed have a fundamental independent existence (as "temporal atoms") in a kind of "space" in which position is measured in units of reciprocal time? Don't know.