If two people look at a city from different hills, their maps don't match. One sees the tower to the left of the river, the other sees it to the right. But both know: it's the same city. That's roughly how our Universe works in this new approach to quantum gravity.

The authors suggest distinguishing between two "flavors" of spacetime. The first is common to all, like the real city down in the valley. The second is unique to each observer, like a hand-drawn sketch. This personal sketch isn't made of smooth lines but of discrete points-events linked by causality (what comes before, what comes after). The paper's main conclusion: when these two descriptions interact, the relativity of location emerges — an effect where two observers can disagree about where exactly something happened. And no exotic geometry is needed for this.

This view flips the usual picture. Previously, it was thought that the relativity of location requires complex geometry in momentum space. Here, everything is built around spacetime itself, with momenta playing a secondary role. It's as if we finally realized that it's not the hill that distorts the map, but that the map itself must be flexible. Practically, this means the new approach can be applied to cosmology on any background, not just in special cases. Causality, what happened before and what after, remains clear even in such flexible models.