The Planck Dive

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Gisela was contemplating the advantages of being crushed—almost certainly to death, albeit as slowly as possible—when the messenger appeared in her homescape. She noted its presence but instructed it to wait, a sleek golden courier with winged sandals stretching out a hand impatiently, frozen in mid-stride twenty delta away.

The scape was currently an expanse of yellow dunes beneath a pale blue sky, neither too stark nor too distracting. Gisela, reclining on the cool sand, was intent on a giant, scruffy triangle hovering at an incline over the dunes, each edge resembling a loose bundle of straw. The triangle was a collection of Feynman diagrams, showing just a few of the many ways a particle could move between three events in spacetime. A quantum particle could not be pinned down to any one path, but it could be treated as a sum of localized components, each following a different trajectory and taking part in a different set of interactions along the way.

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