To get a feel for why, imagine you’re the landlord of an old house in San Francisco. If you have tenants who throw raucous parties, it might take effort to deal with the situation, but you don’t worry that the festivities will compromise the building’s structural integrity. However, if there’s an earthquake, you’re facing something far more serious. The fluctuations of the three nongravitational forces—fields that are tenants within the house of spacetime—are like the building’s incessant partyers. It took a generation of theoretical physicists to grapple with their raucous jitters, but by the
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