Skip to main content

In a Flight of Starlings - Giorgio Parisi ***

This is very much an attempt to emulate Carlo Rovelli's success with short books containing seven or eight essays, beginning with Seven Brief Lessons in Physics. In this case, Italian Nobel Prize winning physicist Giorgio Parisi gives us a set of eight unconnected essays, some solidly scientific, such as the opening one on how his team studied starling murmurations, others more philosophical or memoir-like, such as his account of ‘physics in Rome around fifty years ago’. 

I personally couldn’t see a lot of interest in the less scientific essays, but the detail of his work on starlings was very interesting - I had read about various computer models of murmurations but had no idea how actual flocks were studied, and Parisi gives us a good account of the methods used. Some of the other essays with a strong science content are a lot less engaging, though, because Parisi (or his translator) really doesn’t know how to describe topics like the particle physics of the 1970s in a way that is accessible to a general reader, merrily throwing in comments like ‘All that was left was to study the Yang-Mills theories in order to understand the sign of the beta function: a negative would be an unexpected result with profound consequences for physics,’ with no unpacking of the terminology.

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.

Either as a result of too literal a translation, or the original being written more like a (bad) academic paper, there are some horribly clumsy sentences. Take the opening of the first chapter: ‘The question of interaction is a crucial one in many areas, including for the purposes of understanding certain psychological, social and economic phenomena. The work described in this essay focuses on how each member of a flock of birds is able to communicate in order to move in a coherent way, producing a single entity that is at once collective and multiform.’ It could be the abstract of a paper. Was there no editor involved? I’ve seen better writing in high school essays.

Overall, then, not an addition to the list of excellent short science books that really get a topic across to the general reader. It is possible to write such books that really hit the spot. Take, for example, Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics or John Gribbin's Six Impossible Things. But this one certainly doesn't.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more