What We Call Empty May Be Where the Relationship Lives

There is an emu in the Australian night sky.

It is enormous, stretching across the Milky Way, yet it is not drawn by joining bright stars together. Its form emerges from darkness: from the great dark lanes and clouds of interstellar dust that interrupt the river of stars.

To see it, you have to change what you are looking at.

Instead of looking for the points of light, you have to look between them.

For Aboriginal peoples whose astronomical traditions include the Emu in the Sky, this darkness was not simply an absence between the stars. It formed something recognisable, meaningful and connected with life on Earth.

 

There is something profound in that reversal of attention.

Perhaps one of the recurring habits of human thought is that we notice things more readily than relationships. We identify the tree, the bird, the person, the cell, the gene, the particle and the star. We give each a name and draw a conceptual boundary around it. What lies between them is easily relegated to background.

Empty space.

Distance.

Nothing.

Yet again and again, closer examination has complicated that picture.

 

The DNA We Called Junk

When scientists began deciphering the genome, protein-coding genes understandably attracted enormous attention. Here were sequences containing instructions for producing proteins, the molecular machinery upon which much of life depends.

Large portions of DNA did not appear to perform this obvious role.

The expression “junk DNA” became widely used.

The term now requires considerable qualification. Much non-coding DNA does indeed have known functions. Some helps regulate when genes are switched on and off. Some produces functional RNA molecules. Other regions contribute to chromosome structure and genome organisation. At the same time, scientists continue to debate what proportion of the genome should properly be considered biologically functional.

The lesson is not that every piece of DNA once called junk has subsequently been discovered to possess a purpose.

The more interesting lesson is epistemological.

We had identified the portions whose function we could readily recognise and were tempted to define the remainder by what we could not see.

Again, the apparently empty territory deserved another look.

 

The Strange Sameness of Electrons

Physics provides an even stranger reason to reconsider our instinctive picture of reality as a collection of separate little things.

Every electron is identical to every other electron. Electrons do not possess individual variations in mass or charge by which one electron can be distinguished from another.

This extraordinary sameness once prompted physicist John Wheeler to suggest an audacious possibility to Richard Feynman: perhaps every electron in the universe was actually the same electron, tracing an immense path forwards and backwards through time.

It became known as the one-electron universe.

It was a speculative idea, not the accepted explanation of electrons, but it contributed to a remarkable way of thinking about electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. In the mathematical treatment developed in quantum electrodynamics, a positron can be represented as an electron propagating backwards in time.

Modern quantum field theory takes us somewhere perhaps even more interesting.

Rather than imagining the universe fundamentally as innumerable tiny independent objects moving through emptiness, quantum field theory describes particles in relation to underlying quantum fields. An electron can be understood as an excitation of the electron field.

The familiar object is no longer necessarily the deepest level of the description.

And the apparently empty space surrounding it is not simply philosophical nothingness.

None of this demonstrates the existence of a Living Field. Quantum field theory should not be recruited as evidence for a biological or ecological hypothesis it was never designed to test.

But it does offer a useful warning.

Our everyday intuitions about what constitutes a thing — and what constitutes nothing — are not necessarily reliable guides to the deeper organisation of reality.

 

What If Relationship Is Something?

Ecology makes this question impossible to avoid.

Consider a tree.

We can identify its trunk, branches, leaves and roots and say, There is the tree.

But where does the tree actually end?

Its roots enter relationships with fungi. Its leaves exchange gases with the atmosphere. Insects pollinate its flowers. Animals disperse its seeds. Microorganisms inhabit its tissues and surrounding soil. Water passes through it and returns to the atmosphere. Carbon enters its body from the air. Minerals arrive through relationships occurring beneath the soil.

Remove enough of those relationships and the object we called the tree cannot continue to exist.

The tree is unquestionably an organism, but it is also a participant in an immense web of relationships without which its individual existence becomes impossible.

Perhaps this is where our language has led us astray. We have names for the organisms — tree, bird, fungus, human, bee, whale — but the relationships between them are harder to point at, and because they are harder to point at, we can unconsciously treat them as secondary.

Yet an ecosystem does not exist merely because many organisms happen to occupy the same geographical area. The ecosystem exists between them: in pollination and predation, symbiosis and competition, decomposition and communication, nutrient exchange, migration, inheritance and cooperation.

The relationships are not decorative threads stretched between otherwise complete organisms. They are part of what makes those organisms possible.

 

The Space Between Things

This brings me to a possibility at the heart of the Living Field Hypothesis.

Perhaps we have been looking for life in much the same way that we look at a conventional constellation. We see the points.

Organisms appear to us as distinct entities scattered across the landscape of evolution. We classify them, sequence them, name them and trace their lineages. These things matter enormously.

But what happens if, for a moment, we shift our attention away from the points? What appears between them?

The Living Field Hypothesis proposes that relationship is not merely a consequence of living systems after the individual components have arisen. Relationship is one of the fundamental conditions through which living systems develop, persist and evolve.

This does not require an invisible substance filling physical space.

The “field” in the Living Field Hypothesis is not proposed as another quantum field, nor as an undiscovered form of energy.

It is a way of asking whether the relational organisation of life itself deserves to be treated as something more fundamental than our organism-centred descriptions have traditionally allowed.

A forest, from this perspective, is not merely a collection of trees. A body is not merely a collection of cells. An ecosystem is not merely a collection of species. And perhaps a biosphere is not merely a collection of ecosystems.

At each scale, relationships produce possibilities that the components cannot produce alone. Something emerges in the between.

 

Learning to See the Dark Emu

There is a reason I keep returning to the Emu in the Sky. It offers a different way of seeing. The stars are real. Their brilliance does not become less important because we turn our attention towards the darkness.

But once we learn to perceive both, another pattern becomes visible. Perhaps this is also what is required when we think about life. The individual is real. The relationship is real. Neither needs to disappear into the other.

But if we insist upon looking only at the individual points, we may fail to perceive the larger form they make possible.

The history of science repeatedly reminds us that I cannot see anything there and there is nothing there are very different statements.

Some non-coding DNA turned out not to be meaningless.

The apparent emptiness between fundamental particles cannot simply be equated with philosophical nothingness. The apparent independence of organisms dissolves surprisingly quickly when we follow the flows of matter, information, energy and ecological dependence that sustain them.

Perhaps the next important question is therefore not simply:

What are living things made of?

Perhaps we must also ask:

What exists between them?

The Living Field Hypothesis begins there. Not by claiming that the space between things contains some mysterious substance science has overlooked, but by questioning the assumption that relationship is merely the empty distance separating the things that really matter. Perhaps the things were never the whole picture. Perhaps we have been staring at the stars.

And only now are beginning to see the shape in between.

 

© Carol Walden 2026. All rights reserved.

Article posted 11 August 2026