"... Imagine you have an image with enormous resolution, but all you really need to know is whether a giant gorilla sits at the center of the image. To that end, a low-resolution picture would suffice. Effective-field theory is the tool a nuclear physicist would use to controllably blur the picture, reduce its complexity, and make the problem computationally tractable. Effective-field theory averages out interactions’ short-range components not relevant to the physics of nuclei, and it provides a form of the force using parameters that can be determined directly from QCD. The resulting NN force can then be used to solve the nuclear many-body problem and calculate all relevant nuclear properties"