A woven basket holds its shape not because it has a rigid frame, but because each cane is interwoven with its neighbors. Pull one out, and the pattern unravels. Quantum mechanics, if we believe the new work, works the same way: its elementary objects do not exist separately, but only in interweaving with each other.

Previously, physicists described particles as isolated waves, and interaction with the environment as something secondary. But the author of the paper says: a particle is always bathed in its environment, and this environment is not noise but part of the particle itself. To describe this, he builds a new space, the tangnet. It is a lattice where nodes are states and the threads between them are entanglement (a special quantum connection where two particles behave as one whole). Distance here is measured not in meters but in the strength of the connection. The elementary cell of such a lattice is a qubit: two subsystems linked so tightly that they have neither an inside nor an outside.

There are no practical applications for this idea yet, but it may help us understand why our classical world appears stable even though it is made of quantum building blocks. The basket that started this text has no distinguished center and no distinguished edge. So does the tangnet: in it, there is neither inside nor outside, only nodes and threads.