The Thing with Feathers by Noah Strycker Read Free Book Online

America and Antarctica don’t have locusts. Passenger pigeons also went extinct shortly after forming flocks of billions. Maybe we should be worried.)
    Still, a million starlings present an impressive sight. A flock of a mere ten thousand is spellbinding as it twists and turns across the evening sky. And starlings, for all the flak they receive, are generally beautiful birds with funky personalities. Even if they have been unnaturally introduced in many places, starlings deserve more respect.
    While unwanted starling populations in the United States are booming, the species is crashing in its native haunts across Europe. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds recently reported that numbers of starlings in the United Kingdom have fallen between 80 and 90 percent in the past thirty years, the largest decline of any British farmland bird. Nobody knows why; perhaps modern farming methods have eliminated insects from the landscape, or the birds have changed their migration patterns to winter elsewhere. Starlings were red-listed in the United Kingdom in 2002 as a species of severe conservation concern, and recent evidence indicates that their population has declined by 40 million there—from an average of fifteen per household garden to just three—since 1979. The flocks that once floated over Manchester have almost all gone.
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    ITALIAN PHYSICIST ANDREA CAVAGNA became engrossed early in his career with mathematical theories of supercooled liquids. When the temperature of a liquid is decreased to a certain point, it crystallizes, as water turns to ice. Given certain conditions,though, it’s possible to maintain a liquid below that critical temperature, and odd things happen to supercooled liquids; for instance, if you cool a liquid fast enough, it becomes a viscous glass that responds extremely slowly even when returned to normal temperatures. Cavagna spent years delving deep into the physics behind these events.
    For his Ph.D. research, he studied theoretical physics under the supervision of Giorgio Parisi, one of Italy’s most eminent physicists. Parisi is best known for his investigations of spin glasses, disordered magnets with characteristics similar to chemical glasses, such as windows; he’s also made significant contributions to particle physics and quantum field theory, and won a range of prestigious awards, including the Boltzmann and Max Planck medals. If anything, Parisi likes to focus on disorder—in magnets, glasses, pure statistical theory, and whatever else he can find.
    Cavagna picked up some of his famous adviser’s research tastes, including an interest in disordered systems, and continued to study supercooled liquids and glasses after finishing his Ph.D. In 2006, he signed on to a project called StarFLAG, which would change the course of his career.
    The ambitious project, overseen by Parisi, was designed to probe the mechanics of starling flocks in order to understand other swarming systems. Teams of scientists from France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Italy worked together, each group tackling a different aspect of the issue—computational models, wind tunnel experiments, social theories, and so forth. Cavagna led the group that used stereoscopic photography to record starling flocks in Rome; when they managed to describe a flock of thousands of birds for the first time, he was hooked. Using his training as a theoretical physicist, Cavagna, with his team, cracked a biological phenomenonthat had mystified onlookers for generations—even though he had no experience in biology, wasn’t what you’d call a birdwatcher, and had hardly conducted a single tangible experiment in his life.
    The objectives of StarFLAG went beyond starling flocks. In a sweeping mission statement, the project aimed not only to capture data on bird flocks, but also to use those data to construct new models of collective behavior. Then, the scientists hoped, they would be able to apply their knowledge to other