Consider also this bizarre sentence of James Overduin : [i] "Spacetime behaves relationally but exists absolutely."[/i] That sentence is both parts senseless and self-contradictory. In particular it unnecessarily invokes hot philosophical problems, the first being instrumentalism.

(Parenthetically, the Minkowski 4D spacetime is a mathematical structure used by working physicists to understand and quantify the situation. But the structure itself cannot be said to extrapolate to an object in reality. In short, the "geometric structure" of General Relativity both begins and ends on the chalkboard. This is roughly a statement of Instrumentalism from philosophy of science.)

Occam's razor entails that if the objects of physics behave relationally, that it is wise to remove a static fabric of space. It is unwise to artificially tack on an extraneous Empty Space object, and declare its "absolute existence". That is to say, at all stages the [b]simpler[/b] explanation is that a background spatial fabric does not exist.

In doing so, we do not gain any contradictions with experiment. Not only do the particles themselves behave relationally, the fields they generate behave relationally. In lay terms, the field is "dragged along with" the particle that generates it. The fields are not attached or pinned down to a static spatial background.

What are the physical ramifications? They are manifold in variety. One example is electric fields. If two charged particles are co-moving, the direction of the coloumb force is calculated in the direction of the "instantaneous now" position of the opposing charge, not from the direction of where the charge was located a few nanoseconds ago. This is very unintuitive at first, but becomes crystal clear with the realization that electric fields move along with the motion of the charge.

The second example is gravity. The gravitational force between earth and sun is calculated in the direction of the "instantaneous now" position of the sun, not from the position of the sun 4 minutes ago. Indeed, if gravity were calculated from the light-lagged position of the sun, the entire solar system would be unstable. The solar system would have broken apart long ago. The sun would have 'flung' the planets into deep space like a man flinging a rock with a sling. This is the most drastic physical evidence that fields are "carried along with" the objects that generate them.

So we are dealing with a situation in which the particles and their corresponding fields act in all cases , relationally, that is, independent of a static background. Both James Overduin, and a poster in the /r/physics thread have invoked the same fallacy. The fallacy is that becuase a mathematical equation on the chalkboard has "geometric structure", that it follows that the structure described by the equation must also have a physical existence in the real world.

No self-respecting philosopher would ever commit this fallacy. Time and again, history is rife with people committing this fallacy. It was once considered self-evident that the shapes describing a physical system also are repeated in the real world. Time and again these ideas were debunked when science advanced its knowledge. It was presumed that stars were somehow painted on a distant sphere that is immobile -- until modern astronomy showed that they are neither static nor all on the same sphere.

Both Einstein and Ernst Mach publically adopted with this position. They understood clearly that the "coordinate systems" used by the equations of physics were mere 'artifices' that existed only on a chalkboard. The physical systems in-themselves (Immanual Kant) had no coordinates. Because they were artifices, any coordinate system could be freely changed , moved, and re-mapped without altering the underlying theory, or its predictions.

Why have physicists of 2015 suddenly redacted their position on this? As far as we can see, there is no demonstrable physical evidence for establishing a seperate ontology of Empty Space. The only "evidence" provided so far are mathematical details of existing formula.