Sir Isaac Newton's dubious cure for the plague
Growing electricity on trees, building homes with fungi, and how elephants die in the wild.
Let me first wish you a very happy new year!
I hope that 2021 is the year that we collectively put the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic behind us. I also hope that personally it is a good year for you— that you get the vaccine that you and your family members need, and that your life attains some form of normalcy again. I know it will not be possible for everyone, especially those who suffer directly from the loss of loved ones or their livelihoods. We must not be eager to forget that the pandemic won’t end in 2021 either even after we are vaccinated.
I have been one of the lucky ones. No one in my immediate family fell sick with the virus this year.
The Spanish novelist Javier Marías was absolutely dead on that “there is something unhealthy about curiosity, not for the reasons usually given, but because it leads inexorably to exhaustion.” If 2019 had been a year of self-induced physical exhaustion while I hopped all across the U.S., Mexico, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Singapore, China, and India, then 2020 was a year of mental exhaustion. Stuck at home with no outlet for my curiosity, I read over a hundred books— the most I’ve ever read in a single year in my life. I also wrote a book on COVID-19, which will be out in February.
It is no mean feat trying to write accurately about an event while it is occurring, but in the process I have also realized how fortunate and privileged I am, because only a privileged person with a roof over his head, a steady job and paycheck, and a caring family can write a book during a pandemic. But it has been an exhausting year!
Yes, I know very well that the passage of a year doesn’t mean anything has to change. Calendars are, after all, created by humans; they are not divinely ordained. And our lives are short and insignificant compared to the vastness of the universe. Carl Sagan once said that if you put the cosmic scale on a Gregorian calendar, all of human history would take up no more than ten seconds on December 31. But our lives certainly mean something to us.
Let us hope that in 2021, our lives are wondrous, expanding, and dynamic like the universe itself.
Hope is, after all, a beautiful thing, like morning dew.
Newton and the Great Plague
One of the most repeated stories during this pandemic is how Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus while in quarantine during the Great Plague epidemic of 1665. This anecdote has been used by many to shame the rest of us into examining our own work habits in 2020. There’s more to this simple story, even though Newton did in fact, have a very productive few years during the epidemic. And, genius though he was, Newton did not invent calculus in a vacuum. Gottfried Leibniz has a legitimate claim as at least a co-inventor.
Incidentally, the Great Plague of 1665 was immortalized in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of The Plague Year, which also made a resurgence in reading lists for 2020. I do not know anyone who has actually read it, but everyone seems to be talking about.
Newton was undoubtedly a genius, though much of his discoveries have undergone considerable refinement in the centuries since. But that is to be expected. Even Einstein was wrong on many things. Newton’s original discoveries also remain widely misunderstood. I had a physics teacher in school who said that it took an apple falling for Newton to discover gravity. This is ludicrous, since people had known about gravity and its effects for centuries. Newton did not discover that gravity exists; he elucidated its properties, and formulated laws for understanding it. It is perhaps a fine distinction, but one worth making similar to telling people that J.C. Bose didn’t discover that plants are living (because that had also been known for millennia prior).
Newton is believed to have said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” This would make it seem like he was a very humble man. Nothing could be further from the truth. Newton had legendary squabbles with Leibniz and with physicist Robert Hooke. After Newton was elected as the President of the Royal Society in 1703, he tried to remove Robert Hooke from all history books. Because of Newton’s vendetta there is no known contemporary portrait of Hooke (who is the discoverer of the cell).
In December of this year, three pages of Newton’s notes were sold for around $500,000. These notes are burned around the edges, and the blame goes to Diamond, Newton’s dog who had supposedly knocked over a candle. But these notes do not contain some of Newton’s finest theories. They are unpublished notes highlighting alchemy, occult affairs, and the apocalypse of the bible. Newton believed the ancient Egyptians knew the secrets of alchemy- or the ability to turn base elements into gold.
Another manuscript that was auctioned earlier this year contained Newton’s treatment for the plague. The treatment consisted of toad vomit lozenges made by suspending a toad by its legs in a chimney for three days until it vomited up half-eaten insects. This vomit was to be captured on yellow wax and made into lozenges. Suffice it to say that Newton and his contemporaries did not know what caused the plague and how it was spread. That would not be known until 1884 when Alexandre Yersin found that the disease results from a bacterium.
Newton’s plague manuscript was sold in June for over $81,000, a sizeable sum even in 2020.
Another fact about Newton is that he lost a fortune by trying to time the market. The story is well known and Physics Today ran a story about Newton’s misadventure that summed it up nicely—
Brilliant scientists have been known to do foolish things, but Isaac Newton’s financially disastrous moves during the South Sea Bubble of 1720 are a particularly remarkable blunder. When it was founded in 1711, the South Sea Company was primarily a scheme for managing British government debt. Newton was an early investor and profited nicely as the price of South Sea stock rose over the course of the 1710s. However, in 1720 the company’s stock experienced one of the most legendary rises and falls in financial history. Newton decided in the early stages of that mania that it was going to end badly and liquidated his stake at a large profit. But the bubble kept inflating, and Newton jumped back in almost at the peak. His experience provides an instructive example of how even brilliant thinkers can go astray in an environment that lends itself to collective delusions as a result of the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation.
Here’s a graphical representation of Newton’s misadventure.
Chastised by that experience, Newton wrote— “I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men.”
It is obvious to me now that all humans are complex characters, not the unidimensional iconic figures that we read about in hagiographies when we were children.
Growing electricity on trees
This one shocked me. Scientists in Italy have found a way to tap enough energy from one leaf to power at least 150 LED lights. How does it work?
Every time the wind blows, trees generate an electrical charge from leaves brushing against one another— a process known as contact electrification. Adding a few artificial leaves enhances the amount of electricity that can be harvested by this process. Imagine, then, massive green forests all plugged in to the grid and generating clean, renewable energy.
This video demonstrates just how it works:
Building homes from fungi
In the future, it is quite possible that humans will have permanent settlements on the Moon and on Mars. Right now, the concept of building involves carrying all of our construction materials with us like a turtle carries its own home on its back, but NASA is experimenting with the idea of using living organisms— in this case fungi— to create buildings.
The idea is to use parts of the fungi known as mycelia to create functional blocks that can be used instead of concrete. The fungi will grow and so will the mycelia. Using cyanobacteria to provide the necessary nutrients and energy source, we will have living factories that churn out construction materials.
Homes built with these mycelia might have living circuits that can self-assemble and heal. Futurism has an incredible story about this—
“This is really challenging, but a real opportunity to explore how buildings could grow, self-repair, adapt and disrupt conventional ways of building production by working with highly local resources and growing in-situ to minimize logistics and energy use in material production,” said Phil Ayres, a co-author of the paper from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, “aiming towards a circular economy for construction.”
This is how NASA describes the project—
The harsh environments of the Moon and Mars will require new ways of living – growing homes instead of building them, mining minerals from sewage instead of rock. But by turning to the elegant systems of our own natural world, we can design solutions that are green and sustainable. Whether on distant worlds or our own ever-changing Earth, fungi could be what brings us boldly into the future.
The plan seems a bit far-fetched right now, but the need for sustainable materials is not. Researchers are moving ahead with creating advanced and smart materials from fungal mycelia for our planet.
Perhaps 7% of the world’s carbon emissions each year come from making cement, a key ingredient in concrete. And concrete is the most used man-made product on the planet. Having fungus among us as building material might help alleviate that down-to-earth problem.
How elephants die in the wild.
I want to share a fact I picked up while learning more about mammalian teeth. Elephants have very few natural predators apart from humans. In the wild, they can live up to the ripe old age of seventy, though they seldom live that long. Most elephants that live more than sixty tend to die of starvation, but it might not be for any of the reasons we might have guessed.
Most mammals, including humans have two sets of teeth in their lives. Elephants have six. But if an elephant outlives its last set of teeth, it can no longer chew its food. An elephant that has gone through all of its six sets of teeth can often be found near a watering hole trying to stay hydrated in its last moments of life. These watering holes, are also known as elephant graveyards (so that part of The Lion King has basis in reality after all).
What will become of this newsletter in 2021?
Thank you for reading, sharing, and signing up! In four months, the newsletter has received over 10,000 views.
Please do drop me a note to let me know how I’ve been doing. I started this newsletter not quite sure what I wanted to write about, or if I’d be able to send a newsletter out every week. It turns out I have a lot to say.
I have ideas for serialized stories— longer pieces with narratives that go a little bit beyond facts and take a few “chapters” to cover. There are a fair number of compelling scientific and medical mysteries that I uncovered in the process of writing the COVID book. There are also stories that make us sit up and take notice of the world around us, how fragile it is, and how life around us might come crashing down one day. After all, the real world is far more fantastic than anything that we could’ve ever imagined.
The link for the hardcover “COVID-19: Separating Fact from Fiction” is now available on Amazon’s Indian site.
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Fascinating stories from Past & of Future! My takeaway and the part that we are currently living would be -
"His experience provides an instructive example of how even brilliant thinkers can go astray in an environment that lends itself to collective delusions as a result of the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation."
Happy New year! Fascinating story about Newton. He was as fallible as any one of us !!
Do carry on in 2021. A suggestion, can you share your podcast link in your blog so we do not miss it.