I haven't read Schild's Ladder, but that section strongly reminds me of a lecture I attended by David Finkelstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Finkelste

I haven't read Schild's Ladder, but that section strongly reminds me of a lecture I attended by David Finkelstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Finkelstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Finkelstein) given to a physics department composed largely of condensed matter physicists. He basically said that he was going to attempt to explain space-time as a crystal structure, and he said that structure was most analogous to diamond. Then he used condensed matter formalisms to explore the crystal structure and explain how this created the properties of space-time that we see. This was back in 1996 or so.