Like our fingers on granite, the string smears out the jittery ultramicroscopic fluctuations of the gravitational field. Although the resulting fluctuations are still substantial, this smearing smooths them out just enough to cure the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics. And, in particular, the pernicious infinities (discussed in the preceding chapter) that arise in the point-particle approach to forming a quantum theory of gravity are done away with by string theory.
