Sentence:  We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that <WSD>operate</WSD> on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  To produce, as an effect; to cause.