From UnDark, August 11:
Nobel prize winner Giorgio Parisi’s “In a Flight of Starlings” highlights the importance of understanding complexity.
ho hasn’t gazed at a murmuration of thousands of starlings wheeling rhythmically above their roost at dusk, and not wondered at the majesty and mystery of natural systems? For the Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi, merely marveling at nature wasn’t enough. In the early 1990s, he embarked on a decades-long project to install high-end commercial cameras on the rooftops of Rome, timed with millisecond-precision to capture and track every bird in the flock in three dimensions.
In this brief, crisply written memoir, “In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems,” Parisi takes the reader on a journey through his scientific life in the realm of complex, disordered systems, from fundamental particles to migratory birds. He argues that science’s struggle to understand and master the universe’s complexity, and especially to communicate it to an ever-more skeptical public, holds the key to humanity’s future well-being.
In 2021, Parisi shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in part for his work describing mathematically the behavior of exotic materials called spin glasses — metal alloys with constituent atoms that have magnetic properties that interact with each other in complex ways.
His breakthrough came in 1979, when he began working with a mathematical technique called “the replica method,” in which many copies of a system — in this case, spin glasses — are processed and compared for similarities and differences. His first public presentation on the topic, a poster consisting of “two pages torn from a copy book with some scribbles on them,” didn’t make any sense, according to a colleague at the time. But crucially, his calculations worked....
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Also at UnDark:The Simplest Way to Prevent the Next Pandemic? Leave Bats Alone.
