![]() ![]() There’s much here that is charming and comfortable: an eminent man sharing tales of a bygone era. Read this, and you will get at least a frisson of what a top-flight career in physics might feel like. In a Flight of Starlings is the latest addition to an evergreen genre: the scientific confessional. “Ideas are often like boomerangs,” Parisi explains, and you can hear the sigh in his voice, “they start out moving in one direction but end up going in another.” ![]() Having teetered on the edges of quantum chromodynamics, they walked on by decades would pass before either man got another stab at the Nobel. This story was told to Parisi in an attempt to comfort him for the morning in 1970 he’d spent with another hot-shot physicist, Gerard ’t Hooft, dancing around what in hindsight was a perfectly obvious application of some particle-accelerator findings. “Researchers,” writes Giorgio Parisi, recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, “often pass by great discoveries without being able to grasp them.” A friend’s grandfather identified and then ignored a mould that killed bacteria, and so missed out on the discovery of penicillin. ![]()
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