In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems

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Its not written in the language of mathematics, which is great for the reader who may not be as fluent in the language of symbols (which can differ even among the sciences). It is as if we were driving at night: the sciences are our headlights, but it is the responsibility of the driver to not leave the road and to take into account that the headlights have a limited range.

My suspicions arose when I opened the file and found it was only 94 pages, divided over eight tiny chapters. There were so many discussions about it, and it was amusing that everybody was saying that Parisi was saying this. It was clear to us that this had to be done by physicists, because of the huge amount of data that had to be analysed. I remember the head of one European government saying that “we cannot go into lockdown until the hospitals are full; otherwise people will not understand the decision to do so.Unfortunately, it quickly degenerated into a memoir, whose most significant aspect was name dropping. We were able to get the acceleration of each bird and to see that some birds start to accelerate or turn in one direction and other birds follow and that this decision was propagating inside the flock. Which poses the question: why didn’t they just use film and shoot it fast, so they could get a slow motion production that would show them everything they wanted to know? As a young child, I was interested in numbers – my mother told me I learned to read numbers aged three.

How to catch my eye: a recent Nobel Prize winner looks at murmurations, the great clouds of starlings that sweep through the sky as one otherworldly being.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. This is why the murmuration seems to stretch into a new shape - starlings along the edges with no other bird beside them are what change its overall shape.

I saw a post on Facebook and I just shared it, thinking it was an interesting idea, but I never actually tried it. Einstein began thinking about relativity after he watched a housepainter falling from the scaffold around his apartment building. Earlier this year, he suggested that when cooking pasta, one should turn the burner off after adding the noodles to boiling water. 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. For this work, together with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe, he won the Nobel prize in physics in 2021.Then, in the very last paragraph, Parisi finally lets the secret out: “This book is my attempt to convey to a wide readership something of the beauty, importance, and cultural value of modern science. Maybe because there were more popular books on physics than mathematics, which is so abstract that it’s difficult to describe. Woolf recognized something deeply felt and shimmering amongst us; Parisi, with his own tools, recognizes the same thing. It all starts with investigating the principles of physics by observing the sophisticated flight patterns of starlings. We had a meeting of academics at the G7 in Paris in 2019, and one thing that we were very worried about was weapons systems controlled by AI.

So trying to describe some complex and sophisticated physics problem without formulae takes real effort. Hugh Everett’s mathematics showed the value in not needing to achieve decoherence to understand the system, but his interpretation in 1956 was not accepted by Bohr, even though Wheeler was initially excited by its prospects. We have seen how measures to contain the pandemic were often taken too late, only when they could no longer be postponed. A bunch of Italian physicists concocted a gizmo of numerous synced cameras, each taking stills of a murmuration.One direct descendant is artificial intelligence, in the sense that work on spin glasses has been very important for a lot of developments in studying neural networks in the 1980s and 90s, and neural networks are the basis of modern artificial intelligence. In so doing, he removes the practice of science from the confines of the laboratory and brings it into the real world. Its a step-back and think-about-how-things-work book that is important for understanding what real science is and how it is achieved. This connected to attempts in physics to understand the behaviour of systems composed of a large number of interacting components.