Book | Between Disorder and Order, Complex Collective Behavior

Complex collective behavior.
The flight of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) is connected to the kind of research carried out by many modern physicists, myself included, and that is one reason it feels especially compelling to me. Our work is to understand the properties of systems in which many agents interact. In physics, those agents may at times be electrons, atoms, spins, or molecules. Their rules of behavior are very simple, yet when gathered into a group they display far more complex collective behavior. Statistical physics has been trying to answer such questions since the nineteenth century. Why do liquids boil or freeze at specific temperatures? Why are some materials, such as metals, conductors of electricity and heat while others are insulators? Some of these questions have already been answered, while others are still being studied.