“A lot of our work is comparative. We look at background behavior. Is there a burst of new activity? We zoom in on that and ask why that is suddenly appearing and why it didn't appear before. Imagine one day you wake up and you find water in a pot is boiling and you want to understand why water is boiling. If you go at it one molecule at a time, it's not giving you the big picture of what is going on. We've probably all done this: you take milk, stick it in the fridge, too lazy to go to the grocery, so you just leave it there. The 11th day, the milk's gone bad. Why did that happen on the 11th day? What was happening was that all you could see was the kind of macro level, you couldn't see the individual pieces of milk. This is a new area of physics, exactly the same as how shock waves—a wave that builds up so quickly, there's no kind of precursor—appear. Using the data we collect online, we have a tool for making predictions of when we expect shocks to arise and what shape they'll have. So the reason we went for a systems level view is because you can't understand water boiling one molecule at a time.”