Can Space Rip?

NPR’s Fresh Air today featured Brian Greene, esteemed super string quantum theorist. He shared an interesting chat with Terry Gross from the program. I don’t know much about physics, but I like to think about the ways scientific processes test language’s reach.  The FA interview has plenty of examples of this. Around the 25th minute of their talk (I was listening over the Internet on RealOne Player), Greene tries to describe the qualities of a spatial
rip. He says it is possible for space to rip, to be separated into parts, while
nothing comes between the bits of space. At the moment it becomes a muddle, I wonder whether it’s a conceptual one or a linguistic one.  Is it that we don’t have the words sufficient to describe aspatial…gaps?  Listen
here
.