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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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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