  One would expect spacetime to have a foam-like structure on the Planck scale
with a very high topology. If spacetime is simply connected (which is assumed
in this paper), the non-trivial homology occurs in dimension two, and spacetime
can be regarded as being essentially the topological sum of $S^2\times S^2$ and
$K3$ bubbles. Comparison with the instantons for pair creation of black holes
shows that the $S^2\times S^2$ bubbles can be interpreted as closed loops of
virtual black holes. It is shown that scattering in such topological
fluctuations leads to loss of quantum coherence, or in other words, to a
superscattering matrix $\$ $ that does not factorise into an $S$ matrix and its
adjoint. This loss of quantum coherence is very small at low energies for
everything except scalar fields, leading to the prediction that we may never
observe the Higgs particle. Another possible observational consequence may be
that the $\theta $ angle of QCD is zero without having to invoke the
problematical existence of a light axion. The picture of virtual black holes
given here also suggests that macroscopic black holes will evaporate down to
the Planck size and then disappear in the sea of virtual black holes.
