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"Animal Magnetism: Why, mathematically, birds of a feather flock together," by Robert J. Coontz, Jr. The Sciences, May/June 1996, pages 10-11.
A magnet is a system of interacting components, all of whose quantum mechanical spins point in the same direction. Although each component only "knows" the spin of its nearest neighbors, the short-range interactions nevertheless give rise to a long-range phenomenon, that of magnetization of the entire system. Renormalization theory, developed in the 1970s by physics Nobelist Kenneth G. Wilson, attempts to explain mathematically how such things can occur. This article discusses attempts to use renormalization theory to model how birds fly in flocks. Each bird knows only the direction in which others nearest to it are traveling, and yet the entire flock travels in the same direction. As the article explains, the motion of the flock is important in insuring that the birds stay in formation and all fly in the same direction. performances.
-Allyn Jackson
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