There is no empty space

Physicists got the Nobel for doing the more accurate Michelson–Morley experiment , not about the speed of light but about the elasticity of the very constituent of space, the quantized unit of vacuum.

To find the smallest of the small, it pays to dream big. The American physicists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics today for their leading roles in the discovery of “gravitational waves,” tiny ripples in space-time set in motion by faraway cataclysms such as the collisions of black holes.

Time and distance are an approximation we engineers created, damn useful but artificial.