Gedankenexperiment is the German word for a thought experiment: an adventure that happens entirely inside your head. Pixel Albert Einstein has dozed off over his notes, and tonight's daydream is a big one, a dream he will later call Gedanken Glide. He is standing in a little brass lift with a round porthole, floating high above a sleeping old town, while below him the whole of space stretches out like a rubber sheet, sagging gently under tiny planets.
The lift has no cable, only two small jets of light underneath, so every puff carries him up and gravity does the rest. Ahead, the dream has built a course of grandfather clocks stacked into towers, chalkboard pillars covered in scribbles and mirrored tubes where a pulse of light bounces back and forth. Little pocket compasses, just like the one that puzzled him as a boy, drift in the gaps between them, their needles all pointing onward. How many can he catch before the alarm clock rings?
