But since the book was supposed to be about complex systems, from a man who won a Nobel Prize for his insights, I eagerly ploughed onward. We have seen during the pandemic the tragedy of the many people who have died refusing to be vaccinated, despite the millions of COVID-related deaths. It all starts with investigating the principles of physics by observing the sophisticated flight patterns of starlings.

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. If he had, he’d know the line between science and everything else we value as a society is connective, not separating.For example, images produced by AI should have some kind of signature so that people can understand if they are real or fake, to prevent us from losing contact with reality. For this work, together with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe, he won the Nobel prize in physics in 2021. We must, as the saying goes, show our work: demonstrate in an engaging way how scientists toil, doubt, succeed, and fail. Along the way, Parisi reflects on the lessons he's taken from a life in pursuit of scientific truth: the importance of serendipity to the discovery of new ideas, the surprising kinship between physics and other fields of study and the value of science to a thriving society.

Photograph: Cecilia Fabiano/LaPresse/PA Images View image in fullscreen Giorgio Parisi: ‘Trying to describe some sophisticated physics problem without formulae takes real effort. My last formal science education was an astronomy class in college (I got a C+), but I was intrigued by Parisi’s goal of explaining how science and culture intertwine.My suspicions arose when I opened the file and found it was only 94 pages, divided over eight tiny chapters. Giorgio Parisi has written a slim, flight-length primer on the ways that “scientists toil, doubt, succeed, and fail. One of the problems was to understand the three-dimensional shape of the flock, which is impossible to capture from a single viewpoint. Giorgio Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist and professor of theoretical physics at the Sapienza University of Rome. He goes on endlessly about the three phases of water and the physics of phase transition, for example.

When he finally gets back to entertaining the reader with what ought to be fascinating observations, it is about theoretical constructs, nothing like murmurations.

The last three chapters were very good - "Metaphor in Science", "How Ideas are Born", and "The Meaning of Science. When you have multiple minima and the ball keeps on rolling and the dynamics change as a function of time. Then, in the very last paragraph, Parisi finally lets the secret out: “This book is my attempt to convey to a wide readership something of the beauty, importance, and cultural value of modern science.