What starlings can tell us about the Universe
September 6, 2023
Brighton, 21st February 2022, 6.14pm: collar up against the wintry cold, I am leaning on the rail of the Palace Pier, watching the salmon-pink sun emerge beneath the cloudbank that is hugging the horizon and instantly begin melting into the sea. All around, the air crackles with the chatter of innumerable starlings. To the delight of those of us gathered there for the best of all end-of-the-pier shows, great airborne rivers of the birds are converging and splitting apart, abruptly changing direction, approaching us and receding, breaking on an invisible shore in mesmerising, shape-shifting waves.
A “murmuration” of starlings is undoubtedly one of the great spectacles of the natural world. But how do thousands upon thousands of birds avoid colliding with each other? How do they collaborate to move in unison like a single supra-organism? These are the kinds of questions Italian Nobel prize-winning physicist Giorgio Parisi set out to answer after being as awestruck as I was in Brighton by the sight of starlings in the skies above his native Rome… Read on
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