Jim Al-Khalili explains:
Then it really is long overdue that we abandon entirely the leftover classical picture of the twin "arenas" of space and time in which material objects solemly and inexorably drift through imaginary ethers, and consider that "empty" space itself is the actual seed of both space AND time. They didn't exist beforehand. They literally spring out of the void in perennial fashion, as from a constant source.
In other words, objects don't so much move "through" spacetime any more than they do through either space or time in isolation; rather things appear to us as immediate combinatorial possibilites that are more or less likely to remain, recombine, appear to move, or be annihilated based on an extraordinarily complex array of subtle mechanisms embedded deep inside of what was once thought to be... nothing but empty space!
Perhaps it was this implicit abandonment of the notion of a "body" subject to explicable external forces that so unsettled Einstein about quantum dynamics, precipitating his infamous comments that God (understood by him to mean the God of philosophy, not of theology) "does not play dice".
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