As was emphasized by Feynman ... among others, the physics of superfluidity lies not in the presence of gapless excitations, but in the paucity of ga… - Anthony Zee

It is almost an article of faith among theoretical physicists, enunciated forcefully by Einstein among others, that the fundamental laws should be orderly and simple, rather than arbitrarily and complicated.

... The quantum Hall system consists of a bunch of electrons moving in a plane in the presence of an external magnetic field <math>B</math> perpendicular to the plane. The magnetic field is assumed to be sufficiently strong so that the electrons all have spin up, say, so they may be treated as spinless fermions. As is well known, this seemingly innocuous and simple physical situation contains a wealth of physics, the elucidation of which has led to two Nobel prizes.

Electromagnetism becomes stronger as we go to higher energies, or equivalently shorter distances.
Physically, the origin of this phenomenon is closely related to the physics of dielectrics. Consider a photon interacting with an electron, which we will call the test electron to avoid confusion in what follows. Due to quantum fluctuations ... , spacetime is full of electron-positron pairs, popping in and out of existence. Near the test electron, the electrons in these virtual pairs are repelled by the test electron and thus tend to move away from the test electron while the positrons tend to move toward the test electron. Thus, at long distances, the charge of the test electron is shielded to some extent by the cloud of positrons, causing a weaker coupling to the photon, while at short distances the coupling to the photon becomes stronger. The quantum vacuum is just as much a dielectric as a lump of actual material.