In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems

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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. We see these thick flocks — or murmurations — in the air, making those swoops and turns seemingly as one body. 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. 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. But since the book was supposed to be about complex systems, from a man who won a Nobel Prize for his insights, I eagerly ploughed onward.

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.Richard Feynman’s lectures taught me to see the static particle apart from and as part of the dynamic wave. Woolf recognized something deeply felt and shimmering amongst us; Parisi, with his own tools, recognizes the same thing.

For decades, science has been warning us that human behavior is setting the stage for a dramatic rise in the temperature of our planet.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. The direction and so the changing shape, is orchestrated from the edges of the murmuration rather than the center. I am more willing than most people to talk with a stranger on an airplane but can understand wanting to avoid it. The interaction between starlings depends not so much on the general distance between them as on the connections between the closest birds. Giorgio Parisi has written a slim, flight-length primer on the ways that “scientists toil, doubt, succeed, and fail.

Along the way, he reflects on the lessons he has taken from a life in pursuit of scientific truth: the importance of serendipity to the discovery of new ideas, the surprising kinship between physics and other disciplines, and the value of science to a thriving society. For example, images produced by AI should have some kind of signature so that people can understand if they are real or fake, to prevent us from losing contact with reality. The book is a lovely overview of complex systems and shared mathematical similarities across fields. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The last three chapters were very good - "Metaphor in Science", "How Ideas are Born", and "The Meaning of Science.Along the way, Parisi reflects on the lessons he's taken from a life in pursuit of scientific truth: the importance of serendipity to the discovery of new ideas, the surprising kinship between physics and other fields of study and the value of science to a thriving society. As a young child, I was interested in numbers – my mother told me I learned to read numbers aged three.

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.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. I wanted to start there to emphasize how difficult it is to understand the many phenomena that we observe almost daily and to convey that complexity is not about what happens in laboratories. So trying to describe some complex and sophisticated physics problem without formulae takes real effort.