On In a Flight of Starlings

I picked this up hoping to learn about birds and complex systems, and I can’t say I learned much about either. What I came away with instead was something about spin glasses, state changes, and quantum chromodynamics. To be honest, the marketing of this book is wrong in every possible way: it’s a memoir by a recent Nobel laureate, sharing a little about his discoveries and how he made them. It’s plenty valuable for that, but that’s not why I picked it up — and had it been sold that way, the readership would be almost none.

Still, I found it worthwhile. The highlights were chapters six and seven, where Parisi sets out his views on the role of metaphor and on how ideas are generated; my own experience of both is a lot like his. At first I wanted to argue with him about how far physics can really be communicated to people without advanced mathematics — I don’t have advanced mathematics, or probably even intermediate; I can count, handle fractions and powers and imaginary numbers, recognize a triangle — but in the end I found him measured. Metaphors, he thinks, are useful but never exact, a bit like translating Proust: you can get the sense, but it lacks the precision of the original and is nowhere near as sophisticated. On ideas, he dwells on the role of the unconscious, on the importance of letting an idea sit and steep — even when it isn’t verbally present, we’re still working it through — though that doesn’t make the idea correct, and it still has to be examined once it surfaces.

Parisi is older and more experienced than I am, and I was glad to learn from him. Early in the memoir he sometimes comes across as a bumbling figure who happened to work some things out, which made me feel less stupid: this is part of the human experience, and it’s worth respecting our own processes and other people’s. On the merits the book is strong, and I’d have rated it highly — but Penguin’s marketing is so brazen that it makes me angry. The cover is one thing; the description is so far off the mark that it’s a flat lie, and that knocks it down a notch for me.