“Now, I don’t even try to model this entire set-up – a piece of apparatus ten kilometers wide – on a subatomic level, atom by atom, as if I needed to start with a kind of blank, ‘naïve’ TOE which would somehow succeed in telling me that all the superconducting magnets would produce certain fields with certain measurable effects, and the walls of the tunnel would deform in certain ways due to the stresses imposed on them, and the protons and antiprotons would circle in opposite directions. I already know all of those things. So I assign them a probability of one hundred per cent. I take these established facts as a kind of anchor … and then reach down to the level of the TOE, down to the level of infinite sums over all topologies. I calculate what the consequences of my assumptions are … and then I follow them all the way back up again to the macroscopic level, to predict the ultimate results of the experiment: how many times a second will the positron detector register an event.”

The graphics responded to her narration, zooming in from a schematic of the detector array crisscrossed with particle tracks, down into the froth of the vacuum itself, thirty-five powers of ten beyond the reach of vision, into the chaos of writhing wormholes and higher-dimensional deformations – color-coded by topological classification, a thrashing nest of brightly-hued snakes blurring into whiteness at the center of the screen, where they moved and changed too rapidly to follow. But these otherwise perfectly symmetrical convulsions were forced to take heed of the certain existence of accelerator, magnets, and detector – a process hinted at by the panchromatic whiteness acquiring a specific blue tinge … and then the view pulled back, zooming out to an ordinary human scale again, to show the imprint of this submicroscopic bias on the detector circuitry’s final, visible behavior.

The animation, of course, was ninety per cent metaphor, a colorful splash of poetic license – but a supercomputer somewhere was crunching away at the serious, unmetaphoric calculations which made these pictures more than stylish whimsy.

And after all my hasty skimming of incomprehensible scientific papers, and all my agonizing over the near-impenetrable mathematics of ATMs, I thought I finally had a handle on Mosala’s philosophy.

I said tentatively, “So instead of thinking of pre-space as something from which the whole universe can be derived in one stroke … you see it more as a link between the kind of events we can observe with our raw senses. Something which … glues together the particular set of macroscopic things we find in the world. A star full of fusing hydrogen, and a human eye full of cold protein molecules, are bridged across distances and energies … are able to co-exist, and affect each other … because at the deepest level, they both break the symmetry of pre-space in the same way.”