Working as a structural engineer in San Francisco, I was questioned why this house collapsed during the earthquake.  I told them that this house is just a soup of atoms mixed together to form molecules, held together by chemical bonds that developed into compounds and eventually created a structure.  If it was possible for anyone to look at a single atom, it would appear to be made up of mostly empty space, between the nucleus and the orbiting electrons, but that is not the case, as the empty space is full of quark and gluon fluctuations.  The structural integrity of this house relies on these quark and gluon interactions, as this is the adhesive that holds everything together, and when these elemental particles get bounced out of whack, buildings will crumble, as nothing is earthquake proof.

Written for Simply 6 Minutes hosted by Christine Bialczak.