How to Avoid a Small World

We had been led to think about this idea of morphing from one into the other by an idea in physics that people call a phase transition. As soon as you put the tiniest amount of randomness into the regular world, it instantly became small. It's surprising because it's such a nonlinear change. This tiny permutation to dramatic results, which is remarkable, but just pops right out of your model. And so we argued in that paper, that's why epidemics were so dangerous in the modern connected world.