  Kibble and Zurek have provided a unifying causal picture for the appearance
of classical defects like cosmic strings or vortices at the onset of phase
transitions in relativistic QFT and condensed matter systems respectively. In
condensed matter the predictions are partially supported by agreement with
experiments in superfluid helium. We provide an alternative picture for the
initial appearance of defects that supports the experimental evidence. When the
original predictions fail, this is understood, in part, as a consequence of
thermal fluctuations (noise), which play a comparable role in both condensed
matter and QFT.
