In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems

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To create a 3D image, we positioned two cameras 25 metres apart on the roof of the Palazzo Massimo in Rome, to track each individual as they moved. As a young child, I was interested in numbers – my mother told me I learned to read numbers aged three. To this end, in this book I have told something of my own story through select reports on significant episodes in my scientific life. 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.

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.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. If he had, he’d know the line between science and everything else we value as a society is connective, not separating. I saw a post on Facebook and I just shared it, thinking it was an interesting idea, but I never actually tried it.

Photograph: Cecilia Fabiano/LaPresse/PA Images View image in fullscreen Giorgio Parisi: ‘Trying to describe some sophisticated physics problem without formulae takes real effort.Unfortunately, it quickly degenerated into a memoir, whose most significant aspect was name dropping.

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. Now that climate change is starting to affect people’s lives, there is perhaps a stronger reaction, but we need much more forceful measures to be taken.

The most beautiful and profound irony is that he found multiple equilibria by pursuing multiple equilibria … through time. Earlier this year, he suggested that when cooking pasta, one should turn the burner off after adding the noodles to boiling water. 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.