In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems

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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. 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. He goes on endlessly about the three phases of water and the physics of phase transition, for example.

Overall his writing skills are very good - easy to follow and grasp without getting lost in his thoughts. We must, as the saying goes, show our work: demonstrate in an engaging way how scientists toil, doubt, succeed, and fail. 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. For physicists, spin means something magnetic, because magnetism is related to spin, to the fact that electrons turn around and work like small magnets. If he had, he’d know the line between science and everything else we value as a society is connective, not separating.When the flock was turning, the impression that one has is that they are turning as a flock, but the reality is that some birds start to turn in advance and the others follow. You stare at the seat back in front of you, stifle a sigh, and try to disassociate — all the while hoping your neighbor catches a clue and has some Excel sheets to poke around in. The deceptively slim volume serves as a forceful argument for the value of scientific literacy at a time when it’s increasingly being challenged by misinformation . 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. 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.

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.Sometimes it takes years to develop them, and all it took was another physicist asking a pointed question. Studying the movements of these communities, he has realized, proves an illuminating way into understanding complex systems of all kinds-collections of everything from atoms and planets to other animals, such as ourselves. These concepts echo through nature, with nature being random in its initial selection and deterministic in its outcome.