When Isaac Newton was a mathematics student at Cambridge in 1665, the University closed its doors. This may have been due to the neighbours complaining about the raucous, high pitched sounds coming from the King’s College choir. The boys had recently started inhaling helium gas to enable them to reach the impossible high notes.* Another reason for the Cambridge door closing was the pesky plague pandemic, which wiped out one third of the population. Young Isaac returned to his family home in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire to shelter from the plague. However Newton, with no access to the university library, and with no decent internet connection, had to develop his own line of mathematical models. While lazing around under an apple tree in the orchard, a falling apple hit him on the head and rebooted his brain. He had an inspired realization that the apple hit him because of the gravitational attraction of the apple to his head, which was very large and heavy due to the extreme size and density of his brains. As Sherlock Holmes noted in “The Blue Carbuncle” “It is a question of cubic capacity. A man with so large of brain must have something in it.” **From this violent encounter with the apple Newton postulated that “every particle attracts every other particle in the universe, with a force directly proportional to the sum of the squares of the other two sides”. So despite the plague lockdown, by being hit on the head Newton produced a theory that led to Newton’s law of universal gravitational attraction of apples to eggheads.
In my own pandemic lockdown, I have produced something of my own modest scientific advance. Due to the majority of people in my city now walking around with cups of takeaway coffee, I attempted proving a law of universal caffeine-ational attraction. However I had to abandon this theory when I discovered that 0.01% of the world’s population prefer chamomile tea. Instead I am developing a mobile phone app which measures caffeine concentration in the bloodstream. It is an extremely simple but highly percolated app which goes very nicely with dark chocolate. It does not require you to take samples of your own blood, or shine a bright light through one ear hole and measure the light coming out of the other ear hole. It is an app which simply requires you to answer a few questions (on your phone, of course otherwise it would be a questionnaire not an app, although it could be a hybrid called a Quapp).
Some sample questions are:
1. How often do you think about coffee?
A) Weakly
B) Strongly
C) Are you kidding? When I finish one I start thinking about the next
2. How does caffeine affect your sleep?
A) Not at all, I sleep like a babyccino
B) I get up two or three times a night to go to the kitchen and make another espresso.
C) Since I’ve discovered coffee I have also discovered that sleep is unnecessary.
3. Measure your heart rate before and after drinking a coffee. Describe the change in your heart rate:
A) It revs up a bit, ok it revs up a lot bit
B) We’re racing baby.
C) I can’t count that fast.
After exhaustive testing, I have concluded that more than three answers of “C” on my app show that you have high caffeine levels. Of course, the app also gives you your total score relative to everyone else to make you feel guilty, as well as the recommended treatment, which unfortunately involves chamomile tea.
Another famous figure, who used his plague lockdown to achieve great things was William Shakespeare. Due to the plague restrictions, which prevented theatres opening in London during 1592 and 1593, Shakespeare could not earn an income as an actor, script writer, or even as a stunt double. However he was financially supported by his patron, the Earl of Southampton and he continued his literary career.*** During isolation he researched material for his hit play Richard III by interviewing every third person called Richard he could find while socially distanced. He also wrote a best-selling love poem, “Venus and Adonis”. This was so popular it was printed and reprinted 15 times before the 1630s. The poem included the memorable lines.
“Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses;
And being set, I’ll smother thee with kisses”.
Très romantic.
Inspired by Shakespeare and the pandemic, I produced a poem using words that rhyme with “virus”. I haven’t actually finished it yet but I’m sure it will be as good as Shakespeare’s rhyming “kisses” with “serpent hisses”. Here is a rough draft. I’ll let you decide who is the better poet.
“Be careful with that virus
It never should divide us
It’s really not desirous
And don’t get laryngitis
Your throat will go all fibrous”.
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©Geoff Milton 2020
* YouTube “King’s College announces a major change”.
** A. Conan Doyle “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”
***bbc.com “Shakespeare indoors”
