Grace Against Gravity and the Physics of Vulnerability: How Birds Fly and Why They Flock in a V Formation

“What we see from the air is so simple and beautiful,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote after her first airplane flight, “I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race — rid it of much smallness and pettiness if more people flew.”

I am writing this aboard an airplane. An earthbound ape in my airborne cage of metal and glass, I wonder who we would be, in the soul of the species, if we could fly — really fly, the way birds do; if we were born not just seeing “the world all s...