Kant famously understood both space and time to be forms of sensibility, the envelopes though which the 'contents' of sensibility - the 'manifold of intuition' - present themselves to our cognition. This idea of space and time as somehow formal, as 'external' to the 'contents' of the world has a long and rich history, in which space and time are often treated as mere formalities, lacking in any particular force or tangibility of their own. In the case of time, this shows itself most obviously in certain scientific experiments, in which time is treated as an independent variable: 'independent' insofar as it is not affected by the experiment itself, but is that 'along which' changes in the dependant variable (say, mass, speed or distance), are measured.


(Here is a simple graph of acceleration, in which the distance traveled by some object increases as time - which remains constant - plods along)

But it only takes a moment's reflection to realize that this understanding of space and time is entirely wrong. The understanding of space and time as merely formal belies the fact that the particular 'characteristics' of space and time (spaces and timings, it might be better to say) play huge roles in how things come about. Space and time are as much 'content' as they are 'forms', in other words. To speak intuitively, everyone knows that timing matters: the fact that I do something now, and not later (leave the house to catch a bus, say), will have a marked and significant effect on the outcome of a situation (me making it on time to work). Similarly, the fact that work is far from me and not down the road, will have a significant impact on how I (ought to) plan my day. When and where things are in relation to each other, geometric/topological and temporal distributions, matter: they in-form outcomes.

At a more technical level, one can see the importance of this - the importance of treating space and time as 'content', as carriers of information - when it comes to protein folding. Proteins are macromolecules (big molecules) made up of amino acids, which are themselves coded for by DNA (DNA -> amino acids -> proteins). Now, the most straightforward (and misleading) understanding of protein formation is to say that proteins are 'programmed' by DNA: input a specific sequence of DNA, output a specific protein (this is literally the job of DNA). But this is not quite right. For DNA sequence (or rather, amino acid sequence) only specifies what is called the 'primary structure' of the protein: the literal order of molecules that make up the entire chain of molecules. Equally important however, are the 'secondary' and 'tertiary' structures of the protein molecule, the specific shapes into any protein 'folds' itself into (for example, helices or pleated sheets), as well as the 'timings' or temporal order in which specific folds in a protein happens (it may be important to 'fold' the helix before the sheet, for example):



A protein that has the right order of amino acids (the right primary strucutre) but the wrong spatio-temporal distributions (secondary and tertiary structures) will fold 'wrongly': they will or can lead to all sorts of health problems. Importantly, one cannot reconstruct or predict what protein will form by knowing nothing other than the DNA sequence alone. You can't read back from protein to DNA, as it were. The philosophical relevance of this is that, when it comes to protein folding, space and time carry information, or rather, spacing and timing, specific geometries and specific timings have effects that cannot be 'read off' primary structure alone. Another way to put this is that spacing and timing are material: they are not idealized 'forms', but forces in their own regard, worldly 'contents'.

One 'macro-world' implication of treating space and time as worldly forces, is to recognize that this entails the need to pay attention to the role of both in, say, politics. Sticking with time, Levi Bryant, for instance, speaks of a 'chronopolitics', in which claims upon our time constitute an entire order of political contestation: the fight for a 5 day work week in the wake of the industrial revolution for instance, was nothing other than political contest over time. On the order of space, the entire field of political geography studies how spatial distributions unevenly effect societal relations - economic, temporal, demographic, and otherwise.