One Michelin-starred chef even commented: “Let’s leave cooking to the chefs while physicists do experiments in their lab. Giorgio Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist and professor of theoretical physics at the Sapienza University of Rome. Parisi’s voice is amiable and conversational, which endows [In a Flight of Starlings] with the feel of a conversation with a wise and generous elder. In so doing, he removes the practice of science from the confines of the laboratory and into the real world.

Sometimes it takes years to develop them, and all it took was another physicist asking a pointed question. At high temperatures they behave like normal magnetic systems, but when the temperature falls below a certain value, they appear to behave like glass in that the magnetic changes get slower and it seems as if the system never reaches equilibrium. When you have two simultaneous images of a flock seen from a different angle, it’s not easy to match the bird in the first image with the same bird in the second. Earlier this year, he suggested that when cooking pasta, one should turn the burner off after adding the noodles to boiling water. So trying to describe some complex and sophisticated physics problem without formulae takes real effort.This makes it easier to swing towards new directions, and makes it easier for individual birds to know their place in the scheme. We had a meeting of academics at the G7 in Paris in 2019, and one thing that we were very worried about was weapons systems controlled by AI. For physicists, spin means something magnetic, because magnetism is related to spin, to the fact that electrons turn around and work like small magnets.

Overall his writing skills are very good - easy to follow and grasp without getting lost in his thoughts. You caused quite a stir in Italy recently when you claimed to have found a more energy efficient way to make pasta, by turning the heat off and putting the lid on two minutes after adding the pasta to boiling water.

In this delightful and deeply thoughtful book, Giorgio Parisi weaves a tapestry of experiences and ideas that connects disciplines and prepares us to appreciate the beauty, importance, and cultural value of science. He goes on endlessly about the three phases of water and the physics of phase transition, for example. The interaction between starlings depends not so much on the general distance between them as on the connections between the closest birds. 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?