The Rules of the Flock: Self-Organization and Swarm Structure in Animal Societies
ISBN: 9780191888052
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Astronomy and Astrophysics Condensed Matter Physics Biological and Medical Physics;

Flocks of birds, schools of fish and swarms of locusts display amazing forms of collective motion, while huge numbers of glow worms can emit light signals with almost unbelievable synchronization. These and many other collective phenomena in animal societies take place according to laws very similar to those governing the collective behavior in the inanimate nature, such as the magnetization of iron and the light radiation of lasers. During recent years, this has led to the study of swarm behavior as a challenging new field of science, in which ideas from the physical world are applied in order to understand the formation and structure of animal swarms.

From these studies, it has become clear that such collective behavior of animals emerges in a self-organized way, without any need of overall coordination. In this book, we present different swarm phenomena of the animal world and compare them to their counterparts in physics, in a conceptual and non-technical way, addressed to a general readership.


Helmut Satz, Professor of Physics, University of Bielefeld

Helmut Satz is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the University of Bielefield in Germany, and has been with the university since 1971. From 1989-1996, he was Staff Member, European Center for Nuclear Research CERN, Geneva. During his career he has been the author of around 250 scientific papers and books, his most recent being Before Time Began: The Big Bang and the Emerging Universe.

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