The Weaver Reads reviewed In a Flight of Starlings by Giorgio Parisi
Goodreads Review of In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems
3 stars
I picked up this book hoping to learn about birds and complex systems. I can’t say I wound up learning much about any of those things. Instead, I left discovering something about spinning glasses, state changes, and quantum chromodynamic theory.
If I’m going to be honest, the marketing of this book is wrong in every single way. It’s a memoir by a recent Nobel Prize winner that shares a little bit about his discoveries and how he made them. The book is plenty valuable for that purpose, but that’s not why I chose to read it. In fact, if that were how the book were marketed, I think the readership would be almost none.
Still, I did feel like the book was valuable. The highlights here were chapters 6 and 7, where Parisi shares his views on the role of metaphor and the way ideas are generated. My own experience …
I picked up this book hoping to learn about birds and complex systems. I can’t say I wound up learning much about any of those things. Instead, I left discovering something about spinning glasses, state changes, and quantum chromodynamic theory.
If I’m going to be honest, the marketing of this book is wrong in every single way. It’s a memoir by a recent Nobel Prize winner that shares a little bit about his discoveries and how he made them. The book is plenty valuable for that purpose, but that’s not why I chose to read it. In fact, if that were how the book were marketed, I think the readership would be almost none.
Still, I did feel like the book was valuable. The highlights here were chapters 6 and 7, where Parisi shares his views on the role of metaphor and the way ideas are generated. My own experience with both of these things are a lot like his.
At first, I felt myself wanting to argue with him about the extent to which physics can be communicated to those who don’t know advanced mathematics. I don’t know advanced mathematics, or probably even intermediate mathematics. I know how to count, I can make sense of fractions and powers and imaginary numbers, I know what a triangle is, etc. But, in the end, I found him really quite measured. He finds metaphors useful but not exact. They tend to be a bit like translating Proust. Yes, you can get it, but it’ll lack the precision of the original, and it won’t be anywhere near as sophisticated.
On ideas, he dwelled mostly on the role of the unconscious. It’s important to let ideas to sit and “steep,” so to speak. Even if they aren’t verbally present in our mind, we’re still working through these things. Even so, that doesn’t mean the idea is necessarily correct—it still must be examined after it comes out.
Parisi is older and more experienced than me, and I’m glad to have been able to learn some things. At times, early in the memoir, he seemed like a bumbling idiot who managed to figure some things out. It made me feel less stupid; these things are part of the human experience, and it’s worth respecting both our own processes and those of others.
Really, this book is worth four stars, but Penguin’s marketing is so audacious that it makes me angry. The cover is one thing, but the description is so far off the mark that it’s simply a brazen lie. Three stars, then.
