Our human-scale world is relatively calm and predictable. Throw a ball on a day with good weather, and you can estimate with some confidence how far it will travel. Cells, by contrast, operate at the scale of nanometers, billionths of a meter. Conditions in that world are dominated by random motions and noise—what biophysicist Peter Hoffmann has dubbed a “molecular storm.” Just from ordinary thermal jiggling, molecules inside our bodies bump into one another trillions of times a second, in a maelstrom that puts ordinary storms to shame. Scaled up to human size, living in the equivalent of the
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