Statistical physics is for the birds

Abstract

At dusk each winter evening, millions of starlings fly in from the countryside to their roosting sites in Rome and, before settling into trees for the night, "they spend something like 20 minutes doing these incredible aerial displays. It's a truly amazing sight," says Andrea Cavagna, a statistical physicist at Italy's National Institute for the Physics of Condensed Matter (INFM). "If you watch a flock of starlings under attack by a predator, they split, merge, and do all these incredible maneuvers to confuse the predator. How can they keep cohesion in the face of that strong perturbation - the attack?".