Imagine that you are looking at the sea from a great height: you perceive a vast expanse of it, a flat cerulean table. Now you descend and look at it more closely. You begin to make out the great waves swollen by the wind. You descend farther, and you see that the waves break up, and that the surface of the sea is a turbulent frothing. This is what space is like, as imagined by Wheeler.* On our scale space is smooth. If we move down to smaller and smaller regions of space, we reach a minute scale, called the “Planck scale,” where space shatters and foams.
