Long ago, some of the greatest minds in theoretical physics, such as Pauli, Heisenberg, Dirac, and Feynman, did suggest that nature's constituents might not actually be points but rather small undulating "blobs" or "nuggets." They and others found, however, that it is very hard to construct a theory, whose fundamental constituent is not a point particle, that is nonetheless consistent with the most basic of physical principles such as conservation of quantum-mechanical probability (so that physical objects do not suddenly vanish from the universe, without a trace) and the impossibility of
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