The Corona Virus will bring a tech surge in China the world has never seen before. The conditions brought by the epidemic are creating a petri dish for innovation. Quarantine will be the catalyst. There is nothing like brilliant minds locked in a room to spark imagination. The darker and more austere the better.
It is a perfect storm of isolation and necessity; unmatched in history…
Except for the last time it happened!
In August 1665, Cambridge University was closed as precaution against the Plague. One of the students sent home was Isaac Newton. Undistinguished in the classroom, Newton went home and worked on optics, gravitation and infinitesimal calculus; the technology that drives Google maps, space ships and walking robots.
It can be argued these unprecedented advances may have been delayed for decades or more. What would have happened if Newton simply finished college and got a job? Or went home and worked on the farm like his mother wanted in the first place? Could this type of free-thinking really happen without a break from the rote transcriptions of a college curriculum? Without that classroom break in 1665, you might just be listening to something on the radio while planning to wake up early tomorrow and bring the crops in!
Everyone knows this Corona Virus is a grave problem…
However, we are all much better prepared to deal with it now. Newton’s work (among others) plays a good part in it. Calculus will surely be used to predict the speed and depth of virus outbreaks or control the optics for those infra-red temperature scanners. Mapping and models predicting the airborne reach of a cough into the heating vent come to mind. (yikes!) Also, we have that great word to lend weight to a subject…
So the next time you are home sick or “quarantined” for some other reason…get that thinking cap on! And, remember me when some Chinese kid presents his working time machine at the tech convention.