Life in the Time of Coronavirus

During the black plague that happened in Europe around 1620, there was a near disaster in Europe when more than a quarter of the population of England was wiped out. In London alone, there was a total lockdown to stop the spread of the plague.

Isaac Newton

Schools and universities were closed down and the students sent home. One of the students sent home was a fussy 24 year-old one named Isaac Newton. When he packed his bags and returned to his rural home, he carried his most precious books and lecture notes and, away from his professors, he got into serious self-education and creative thinking.

Arising from that experience he was able to come up with some brilliant discoveries like the famous law of gravity - triggered by the apple that fell on him while he was meditating in the shadow of the apple tree. He was able to extend it to other bigger ideas and developed a whole new paradigm in science that transformed man’s understanding of the universe - recall these were the days when people were told that the earth was flat.

Without getting into too much detail, the implications of that story should be obvious. In short, man needs moments of serious disruption in order to create a new way of thinking about his world.

Albert Einstein

Another example might help our younger minds. One day, we are told, Einstein was going to give a lecture somewhere in Switzerland I think. On the way in the train, he was watching the spire of a church and he noticed that the farther he travelled away from it, the smaller it appeared until it disappeared altogether.

In his mind, he knew it was still there although he could not see it with his naked eye. This is the incident that triggered his thinking about light as he asked himself: “What is light? At what speed does it travel?” You might know the rest of his story including his most famous equation: E = MC2 which led to the creation of the atomic bomb. At that time, his fellow Jews were under vicious attack led by a neurotic despot known as Adolf Hitler.

When later he was forced to migrate to the US, he joined an interesting group of researchers who were dabbling with practical applications of some of his theories. This was somewhere in the barren deserts in the western part of the country. The second world war had already started in Europe but the US was not directly involved.

Then the Japanese made their fatal error: They decided to join the war and chose to provoke an innocent “bystander” - the United States of America - by bombing Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. The rest of the story you know. It happened in 1945 in spite of Einstein pleading with the President Roosevelt never to use that bomb on humankind. It helped to end that horrid war.

There are other stories that can be told to remind you of other calamities that have confronted modern man - like the Spanish flu, smallpox, leprosy, ebola, etc.

Fast Forward to Coronavirus

As I write this the world has just entered its fourth month since the unwelcome advent of the coronavirus. It is difficult to believe that as we enjoyed our Christmas last December the whole world was going to be plunged into its worst calamity since the plague that wiped out a quarter of mankind.

Sadly, it is here with us and has already infected two million people and killed more than 100,000. Tragically, the US which was initially in denial, has now lost more people than any other country in the world.

Back to the virus. As the world desperately looks for ways to contain its spread, there are some things we can say about the flip side of this tragedy. Some are lessons on our collective behavior towards each other, others are about the structure of our socio-economic development models while others are about, interestingly, new opportunities from the tragedy.

On behaviour, it should be quite clear that despite our different skin colours and languages, we are all human. No amount of tinkering with our religious belief systems is going to change the fact that we all have a common DNA which is designed in such a way that any attempt to alter it will lead us to joining the dinosaurs in extinction. We are in this together.

Quo Vadis?

Finally, a word for our youth. Change is never achieved easily and without cost sometimes great cost. It also requires thinking not merely out of the box but by even throwing away the box altogether, i.e., unconventional thinking.

This virus may have certain attributes that should create new opportunities for you just like it created a new vision for Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. It is up to you as you lie in your government imposed self-isolation or quarantine to ask yourself:

“Is this my Newton moment?”

Remember, every cloud may have a silver lining and, on ending, I quote a poem from an English poet John Donne:

“Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”.

Over to you.

Jh Kimura, PhD,
11th April 2020

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