In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems

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This connected to attempts in physics to understand the behaviour of systems composed of a large number of interacting components. We have seen during the pandemic the tragedy of the many people who have died refusing to be vaccinated, despite the millions of COVID-related deaths. They look forward only, to the bird ahead, maintaining constant distance so that all can fly at the same speed, much as humans driving at fast highway speeds do (for the most part). If he had, he’d know the line between science and everything else we value as a society is connective, not separating. And therefore if for any reason whatsoever someone needs a comment from a Nobel laureate, they ask me.

Studying the movements of these communities, he has realized, proves an illuminating way into understanding complex systems of all kinds-collections of everything from atoms and planets to other animals, such as ourselves. He goes on endlessly about the three phases of water and the physics of phase transition, for example. Maybe because there were more popular books on physics than mathematics, which is so abstract that it’s difficult to describe. In between, there are chapters on Italian physicists he knows, his own history, which began in university in the keystone year of 1968, which he explains in detail, and anecdotes about other physicists and school in Italy. Studying the movements of these birds, he has realized, proves an illuminating way into understanding complex systems of all kinds - collections of everything from atoms to planets to other animals like ourselves.We must, as the saying goes, show our work: demonstrate in an engaging way how scientists toil, doubt, succeed, and fail. When the flock was turning, the impression that one has is that they are turning as a flock, but the reality is that some birds start to turn in advance and the others follow. I was busy running the Accademia dei Lincei, I had my work at the university, and the day after I had to do 20 interviews over Zoom and so on. However, while there was closed captioning, it was only in Italian (fair enough), and there were even more (and more daunting) charts in his video presentation than in his book.

Parisi knows, knew or at least acknowledges pretty much everyone who ever won a Nobel Prize in Physics (He won his in 2021).In so doing, he removes the practice of science from the confines of the laboratory and into the real world. Parisi’s voice is amiable and conversational, which endows [In a Flight of Starlings] with the feel of a conversation with a wise and generous elder. The interaction between starlings depends not so much on the general distance between them as on the connections between the closest birds. As Parisi explains, its the inverse with quantum mechanics, where the evolution of the state is deterministic and the selection measurement is randomly chosen among the various possible outcomes of the experiment. The last three chapters were very good - "Metaphor in Science", "How Ideas are Born", and "The Meaning of Science.