Ideas Can Thrive In A Pandemic

The worst of times and the best of times*—this may be how we will remember the Covid 19 era. Optimists have suggested that, with the virus forcing people to stay home and reflect, something good may come from it. Thousands of suddenly unoccupied minds have been searching for good ideas they could develop, or pressing problems they could solve during their isolation.

This isn’t the first time humanity has faced such a dilemma. There have been other pandemics, and other times people have been required to social distance. Bubonic Plague, which reached England in 1665, was such a time.

Isaac Newton, a student at Trinity College in Cambridge was forced to escape to his family’s farm 60 miles north of London to develop his ideas alone when his university was shut down due to the disease. There he gained new mathematical insights which set the basis of calculus, the mathematics of change.  He created modern physics and used his mathematical discoveries to analyze motion through space and time. He performed experiments on gravity and developed his most famous idea, universal gravitation. Some Historians have suggested that it was the ability to concentrate without distraction that set the stage for his many successes. 

Others say that this is inaccurate, arguing that he had a brilliant mind and a drive to succeed, that he would have accomplished his mission in life anyway. But the truth remains that in the course of less than two years, while he was in isolation, he developed a way of thinking that changed science and the direction of humanity, and literally shifted the universe.

 In an article in the New Yorker (April 6, 2020) Thomas Levenson explores this idea:

“It’s easy to leap from that old man’s memory to the notion that the quiet of the countryside sparked the birth of whole new provinces of knowledge. This is the popular fairy tale of genius: great ideas don’t require the tedious work of sustained attention and hard thinking; they arrive in lightning bolts of inspiration, which in turn come only in the right circumstances, like enforced isolation during an epidemic.”

Newton produced an unbelievable number of exceptional results during his nearly two years away from others.  The theory that connected every object in the universe to the trajectory of that apple falling to the ground might never have happened had he been in other, more social circumstances. We can speculate about this, but we will never know.

Of course, only a small fraction of the world’s population will be able to pull away from the distraction of the pandemic and accomplish something meaningful.Most are consumed with the panic generated by mainstream media and the business of getting through each day while avoiding contact with others. With social and political problems escalating in every country of the world, many of us are stopped in our tracks, unable to focus. 

But the story of Isaac Newton is inspirational, and acknowledges the ability in some to rise above the difficulties of their circumstances. So if you’re isolated at home for the next while, working or reading, or maybe just getting by, you could perhaps remember Newton’s example and how he did almost nothing else with his time but think, reason, and calculate.

And maybe we can gain a little perspective from the observations of Charles Dickens, who wrote this in The Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”