But the immediate and more pragmatic response among researchers was simply to declare that the calculations should disregard jitters on scales smaller than the Planck length. Failure to implement this exclusion would extend a quantum field theory calculation into a realm clearly beyond its range of validity. The expectation was that we will one day understand string theory or quantum gravity well enough to deal with the super-small jitters quantitatively, but the interim stopgap was to mathematically quarantine the most pernicious fluctuations.
