The Fabric of the Cosmos the book, such as discussions revolving around classical physics, quantum mechanics, and cosmological physics. Chapter 2, "The Universe and the Bucket", features space as its key point. The question posed by Greene is this: "Is space a human abstraction, or is it a physical entity?" The key thought experiment is a spinning bucket of water, designed to make one think about what creates the force felt inside the bucket when it is spinning. The ideas of Isaac Newton, Ernst Mach, and Gottfried Leibniz on this thought experiment are discussed in detail. Chapter 3, "Relativity and the Absolute", focuses on spacetime.
Action (physics) (see also below). The action is defined by an integral, and the classical equations of motion of a system can be derived by minimizing the value of that integral. This simple principle provides deep insights into physics, and is an important concept in modern theoretical physics. "Action" was defined in several now obsolete ways during the development of the concept. Expressed in mathematical language, using the calculus of variations, the evolution of a physical system (i.e., how the system actually progresses from one state to another) corresponds to a stationary point (usually, a minimum) of the action. Several different definitions