In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems

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One Michelin-starred chef even commented: “Let’s leave cooking to the chefs while physicists do experiments in their lab. 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. 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.

He went into detail explaining how he organized a method to achieve his goal of recreating a three dimenssional model by using photography of the flock in flight, as well as adding some physics to the process. For physicists, spin means something magnetic, because magnetism is related to spin, to the fact that electrons turn around and work like small magnets. 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. This would limit energy consumption, thus saving money for energy-depleted Italians and reducing overall carbon emissions in the process.And therefore if for any reason whatsoever someone needs a comment from a Nobel laureate, they ask me. I watched about five minutes of it before being distracted by a series of articles about Parisi’s controversial statements about cooking pasta .

The last three chapters were very good - "Metaphor in Science", "How Ideas are Born", and "The Meaning of Science. Our viewpoint was that if one decides to kill some human being, that decision should be taken by people and not machines.

When you have two simultaneous images of a flock seen from a different angle, it’s not easy to match the bird in the first image with the same bird in the second. 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. 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. There’s a growing lack of trust in science, with people denying Covid, or the need for vaccinations, or climate change. If birds at the center tried to change the direction of the whole flock of thousands, it would result in a massive crash, but if the edge pulls away, the whole thing can gracefully stretch and change course, which is what makes it so entrancing.

The interaction between starlings depends not so much on the general distance between them as on the connections between the closest birds. Einstein began thinking about relativity after he watched a housepainter falling from the scaffold around his apartment building.

For this work, together with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe, he won the Nobel prize in physics in 2021.