Gabriela Barenboim

A stone drops into a pond. Ripples spread, fade, and soon the surface is smooth again. But what if the pond has no shores, no bottom, and no characteristic ripple size? That is the world, a scale-free world, where quantum systems live when surrounded by an environment that picks out no particular length or energy.

A runner on the middle of a track suddenly switches to a walk — not speeding up or slowing down, but maintaining a constant pace. Something similar may have happened to the universe itself shortly after the Big Bang.