What do a flock of birds, a traffic jam and the spread of an epidemic have in common?
The answer lies in the physics of complex systems.
A seminar exploring the physics of complex systems: how simple interactions between many elements (animals, people, particles) can give rise to unexpected and hard-to-predict collective behaviour.
From the coordinated flight of a flock, to traffic jams that seem to arise "out of nowhere", right through to the spread of an epidemic, we will discover how physics enables us to analyse very different phenomena using the same conceptual tools.
In the final section, we will explain how this very idea of complexity led to one of the most profound discoveries in Italian physics: the work of Giorgio Parisi, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize, on the "nested valleys" structure of equilibrium states in disordered systems.