Originally Posted by zen_tom

Assume you are in space and you want to measure the distance between yourself and another object. How would you do it? Perhaps by shining a light at it and seeing how long it took for the light to be reflected back? Divide by speed of light and there's your distance. So distance in fact, can most simply be considered as a function of time. i.e. The length of time it takes for one object to effect or signal with another. It also suggests that distance as a concept is meaningless without matter.