In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems

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Parisi uses this book to connect some disparate scientific fields that he’s spent time on, from the way starlings flock to the spin glass work that won him a Nobel prize.

As a young child, I was interested in numbers – my mother told me I learned to read numbers aged three. We wanted to see if there were rules of interaction between starlings that account for their collective movements.

Richard Feynman’s lectures taught me to see the static particle apart from and as part of the dynamic wave. However, by this point, the author had proved himself a compelling teacher, and I wanted to be a good student. This connected to attempts in physics to understand the behaviour of systems composed of a large number of interacting components.

This would limit energy consumption, thus saving money for energy-depleted Italians and reducing overall carbon emissions in the process. 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). The anecdotes failed to give any sense of personality or deliberative process, and the physics were explained (when they were explained, which wasn't often) as if to another professional physicist, and not to a regular reader. 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.When it was time to go to university, I pondered if I should do physics or maths, but in the end I went for physics. This has happened thanks to a re- jection of science that becomes even more serious when it occurs in relation to climate change.

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. You’re angled into your pinched seat, and your seatmate starts telling you stories, at best, of unknown grandchildren and, at worst, vaguely offensive opinions about women in the military or crime in Chicago.Einstein began thinking about relativity after he watched a housepainter falling from the scaffold around his apartment building. For, even with my limited insight into the dynamics of magnetic interactions or the basics of combinatorial calculus (a term wisely left off the book’s cover), I did grasp the main thrust of Parisi’s argument: We live in an intricate web of ever more complicated dynamics, but that web is shaped, stretched, and spun by our little choices and chats. Earlier this year, he suggested that when cooking pasta, one should turn the burner off after adding the noodles to boiling water.

We see these thick flocks — or murmurations — in the air, making those swoops and turns seemingly as one body. 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.You caused quite a stir in Italy recently when you claimed to have found a more energy efficient way to make pasta, by turning the heat off and putting the lid on two minutes after adding the pasta to boiling water.