
…licable ideas such as small worlds and polarisation. But it is has also led to tens of thousands of theoretical papers being written about small variations on models that provide no new insights and are not coupled to applications. In the research area I am closest to, collective animal behaviour, some physics research groups such as Tamas Viscek’s group in Budapest and the Starflag project in Rome have combined theory and experiment to create new insights, but this is again accompanied by pages and pages of accumulating theory in which meaningless models are analysed in the large n limit. The latest physplaining is applying renormalization groups to neural networks, resulting in dubious claims of a fundamental physics of human intelligence.