In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems

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From the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, an enlightening and personal journey into the practice of groundbreaking science. 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. And that as merely the introduction to a book on such complex systems. In a Flight of Starlings by physicist Giorgio Parisi held great promise. Sadly, I spent the whole time looking for it to begin. As unlikely as it sounds, we’ve entered the age of the physics beach read—a breezy stroll through some branch of the science, with alternating touches of profundity and whimsy. Recent exemplars include Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The latest aspirant is In a Flight of Starlings, a slender, uneven collection of essays by Giorgio Parisi about his life in physics, from his student days in Rome to the work that won him a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics. Parisi tells of his adventures in thinking in this alarmingly brilliant, witty and brief book Robert Fox, Evening Standard

Per questa ragione ero andato ad ascoltarlo direttamente in un una sua peraltro affollatissima conferenza. Entusiasmanti tutti i riferimenti alla storia della Fisica e a come la teoria sia frutto di continue osservazioni e congetture:

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Along the way, he 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 disciplines, and the value of science to a thriving society. In so doing, he removes the practice of science from the confines of the laboratory and into the real world.

I sistemi complessi sono tutti quei sistemi lontani da uno stato di equilibrio, fatti di movimentati stati alternativi che producono comportamenti difficili da prevedere e stimare statisticamente An interesting collection of essays reflecting on Parisi's long career in science . . . The scientific explanations are admirably lucid The Wall Street Journal 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. In so doing, he removes the practice of science from the confines of the laboratory and brings it into the real world. Yes, it was. For me, it’s very important to use metaphorical language. Sometimes, in popular science books, people write formulae. That would save a lot of time, but I would lose a lot of people because a formula that seems easy for me to read is harder for other people. So trying to describe some complex and sophisticated physics problem without formulae takes real effort.It seems physicists can get their ideas from anywhere. Sometimes it takes years to develop them, and all it took was another physicist asking a pointed question. Einstein began thinking about relativity after he watched a housepainter falling from the scaffold around his apartment building. The painter was sitting in a chair the entire time. This is apparently what got Einstein thinking. And he changed the world with it. I didn’t really understand the preface which attempts to justify the book's existence. It says that events such as Covid and climate change mean ordinary people have to trust science and understand how scientists work, so I’m going to tell you about my work. There’s a logical disconnect here: his work may well be genuinely interesting, but it is not going to convince a single sceptic to accept vaccines or the need to take action on climate change. in quel momento che lo stormo di storni sembra un grande corpo con tanti occhi (il sistema complesso) impegnato in un’unica coreografia. 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. From the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, an enlightening and personal journey into the practice of groundbreaking science