Earlier today, I finished reading Giorgio Parisi’s In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems. Honestly, I expected it to be a little more potent. If we can compare an Italian scientist to an Italian scientist, it could have at least been as good as Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics. But it wasn’t.
Yet, Parisi’s book is filled with aha moments. To read it is not a waste of time. The doors open, and we enter the mind of a physicist from the back door. This is what happens behind the scenes. This is how scientists think.
And it seems to me now that all good scientists are somewhat into literature and/or philosophy. The references I come across in their books are enough to prove me right.
So, it turns out, only pseudo-scientists who lack creativity say, “Philosophy is dead.” And their statement can also be considered true because, in them, philosophy is dead.
Reading In a Flight of Starlings reminds us of something we tend to forget: There’s poetry everywhere, even in physics.
Before I close this entry, here are two quotes from Giorgio Parisi’s book:
“The physicist sometimes uses mathematics ungrammatically; not following all the rules of grammar is a license that we grant to poets.”
“In the sciences as in poetry, there is hardly a trace in the finished product of the arduous work that the creative process has demanded, or the doubts and hesitations that have been overcome in order to achieve it.”
Bored Absurdist 