Our viewpoint was that if one decides to kill some human being, that decision should be taken by people and not machines.

It is as if we were driving at night: the sciences are our headlights, but it is the responsibility of the driver to not leave the road and to take into account that the headlights have a limited range. However, while there was closed captioning, it was only in Italian (fair enough), and there were even more (and more daunting) charts in his video presentation than in his book.If citizens and politicians do not trust science, we will move inexorably in the wrong direction, and the struggle against any number of global ills—global warming, infectious disease, hunger and poverty, the depletion of the planet’s natural resources— will fail. Its a step-back and think-about-how-things-work book that is important for understanding what real science is and how it is achieved. He explains the way in which he is able to to see connections hidden from others simply because of the multiplicity of the projects he has worked on over time. Richard Feynman’s lectures taught me to see the static particle apart from and as part of the dynamic wave. Which poses the question: why didn’t they just use film and shoot it fast, so they could get a slow motion production that would show them everything they wanted to know?

That would save a lot of time, but I would lose a lot of people because a formula that seems easy for me to read is harder for other people. In between, there are chapters on Italian physicists he knows, his own history, which began in university in the keystone year of 1968, which he explains in detail, and anecdotes about other physicists and school in Italy. It’s a bit like what happens on crowded buses, where frequently the crush is greatest near the doors, where passengers who have just got on accumulate, together with those who are about to get off and others still who want to continue their journey. Photograph: Cecilia Fabiano/LaPresse/PA Images View image in fullscreen Giorgio Parisi: ‘Trying to describe some sophisticated physics problem without formulae takes real effort. As Parisi explains, its the inverse with quantum mechanics, where the evolution of the state is deterministic and the selection measurement is randomly chosen among the various possible outcomes of the experiment.His first popular science book, In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems, which charts some of the highlights of his life’s work and makes a passionate case for the value of science, is published on 11 July.

This book is, in part, his attempt to “make the public aware of what science is and how science and culture are intertwined,” especially considering major societal issues like climate change and the covid-19 pandemic.

This is why the murmuration seems to stretch into a new shape - starlings along the edges with no other bird beside them are what change its overall shape. A bunch of Italian physicists concocted a gizmo of numerous synced cameras, each taking stills of a murmuration.