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Good life world, Улица Катеринская, Kyiv (2025)

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Улица Катеринская

02/03/2023

The Axiom-1 mission to send four private astronauts to the International Space Station is the first of many missions planned by NASA to expand the ISS for commercial use as part of what's being called the low-Earth orbit economy.

The commander of the Axiom-1 mission has emphatically stated that this is not an example of space tourism, as the crew have undergone training and the mission includes plans to conduct biomedical research.

Crew members – all men aged 52 to 71 – reportedly paid a whopping US$55 million (£42.3 million) per ticket, an amount that would no doubt fund a formidable biomedical research program here on Earth. But beyond the ludicrous ticket price, I'm concerned about the potential environmental impacts of such space jaunts.

The mission is using a SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket, with the crew located in the Crew Dragon spacecraft at its apex. The rocket has two stages: the reusable booster that holds most (about four-fifths) of the fuel and that returns to Earth for reuse, and a discarded second stage.

The booster reaches an altitude of about 140 km (87 miles) before returning to Earth. The energy required to propel the spacecraft to the ISS is achieved from the combustion reaction between rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, releasing byproducts hazardous to the environment.

Rocket launches and returning reusable components release air pollutants and greenhouse gases into multiple atmospheric layers. In the middle and upper atmosphere, these can persist for years compared with equivalent pollutants released at or near the Earth's surface, which linger for weeks at most.

This is because there are fewer chemical reactions or weather events to flush pollutants out of middle and upper layers.

Potent pollutants
The kerosene fuel used by SpaceX Falcon rockets is a mix of hydrocarbons, composed of carbon and hydrogen atoms. These react with liquid oxygen to form carbon dioxide (CO2), water v***r (H2O) and black carbon or soot particles that are released from the rocket exhaust.

CO2 and H2O are potent greenhouse gases, and black soot particles are very efficient at absorbing the sun's rays. That means all these chemicals contribute to warming the Earth's atmosphere.

Nitrogen oxides (NOx), reactive air pollutants, also form during launch due to very high temperatures causing a bonding reaction between usually stable nitrogen and oxygen molecules. NOx is also produced when the rocket's reusable components return to Earth, due to extreme temperatures produced by friction on its heat shields as they whizz through the mesosphere at 40km-70km.

When these particles make contact with the ozone layer (in the stratosphere), they convert ozone to oxygen, depleting the fragile sheath that protects the planet from the sun's harmful UV radiation.

Although total CO2 emissions from this launch will be small in comparison to those from the global aircraft industry, emissions per passenger will be around 100 times those from a long-haul flight.

Soot emissions are also much less than those from the aircraft industry, but when released into the middle and upper atmosphere, soot has a warming effect 500 times greater than at levels closer to Earth. This is in part because there are typically no clouds and few to no aerosols competing with soot to absorb the sun's rays.

The potential opportunities of creating industry and trade networks within low-Earth orbit have been likened by an Axiom co-founder to the early days of developing the internet, now an almost universally accessible technology.

If we extend that analogy to imagine similarly high levels of access to the low-Earth orbit economy, rocket launches are likely to become far more common than just the 146 launches achieved in 2021.

Such a scenario would substantially alter Earth's climate and undermine our significant progress in repairing the ozone layer. At the very least, research is urgently needed to assess the consequences of a flourishing low-Earth orbit economy for our planet down below.

02/03/2023

The peer review process is a cornerstone of modern scholarship. Before new work is published in an academic journal, experts scrutinize the evidence, research and arguments to make sure they stack up.

However, many authors, reviewers and editors have problems with the way the modern peer review system works. It can be slow, opaque and cliquey, and it runs on volunteer labor from already overworked academics.

Last month, one of us (Kelly-Ann Allen) expressed her frustration at the difficulties of finding peer reviewers on Twitter. Hundreds of replies later, we had a huge crowd-sourced collection of criticisms of peer review and suggestions for how to make it better.

The suggestions for journals, publishers and universities show there is plenty to be done to make peer review more accountable, fair and inclusive. We have summarized our full findings below.

Three challenges of peer review
We see three main challenges facing the peer review system.

First, peer review can be exploitative.

Many of the companies that publish academic journals make a profit from subscriptions and sales. However, the authors, editors and peer reviewers generally give their time and effort on a voluntary basis, effectively performing free labor.

And while peer review is often seen as a collective enterprise of the academic community, in practice a small fraction of researchers do most of the work. One study of biomedical journals found that, in 2015, just 20 percent of researchers performed up to 94 percent of the peer reviewing.

Peer review can be a 'black box'
The second challenge is a lack of transparency in the peer review process.

Peer review is generally carried out anonymously: researchers don't know who is reviewing their work, and reviewers don't know whose work they are reviewing. This provides space for honesty, but can also make the process less open and accountable.

The opacity may also suppress discussion, protect biases, and decrease the quality of the reviews.

Peer review can be slow
The final challenge is the speed of peer review.

When a researcher submits a paper to a journal, if they make it past initial rejection, they may face a long wait for review and eventual publication. It is not uncommon for research to be published a year or more after submission.

This delay is bad for everyone. For policymakers, leaders and the public, it means they may be making decisions based on outdated scientific evidence. For scholars, delays can stall their careers as they wait for the publications they need to get promotions or tenure.

Scholars suggest the delays are typically caused by a shortage of reviewers. Many academics report challenging workloads can discourage them from participating in peer review, and this has become worse since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It has also been found that many journals rely heavily on US and European reviewers, limiting the size and diversity of the pool of reviewers.

Can we fix peer review?
So, what can be done? Most of the constructive suggestions from the large Twitter conversation mentioned earlier fell into three categories.

First, many suggested there should be better incentives for conducting peer reviews.

This might include publishers paying reviewers (the journals of the American Economic Association already do this) or giving some profits to research departments. Journals could also offer reviewers free subscriptions, publication fee vouchers, or fast-track reviews.

However, we should recognize that journals offering incentives might create new problems.

Another suggestion is that universities could do better in acknowledging peer review as part of the academic workload, and perhaps reward outstanding contributors to peer review.

Some Twitter commentators argued tenured scholars should review a certain number of articles each year. Others thought more should be done to support non-profit journals, given a recent study found some 140 journals in Australia alone ceased publishing between 2011 and 2021.

Most respondents agreed that conflicts of interest should be avoided. Some suggested databases of experts would make it easier to find relevant reviewers.

Use more inclusive peer review recruitment strategies
Many respondents also suggested journals can improve how they recruit reviewers, and what work they distribute. Expert reviewers could be selected on the basis of method or content expertise, and asked to focus on that element rather than both.

Respondents also argued journals should do more to tailor their invitations to target the most relevant experts, with a simpler process to accept or reject the offer.

Others felt that more non-tenured scholars, PhD researchers, people working in related industries, and retired experts should be recruited. More peer review training for graduate students and increased representation for women and underrepresented minorities would be a good start.

Rethink double-blind peer review
Some respondents pointed to a growing movement towards more open peer review processes, which may create a more human and transparent approach to reviewing. For example, Royal Society Open Science publishes all decisions, review letters, and voluntary identification of peer reviewers.

Another suggestion to speed up the publishing process was to give higher priority to time-sensitive research.

What can be done?
The overall message from the enormous response to a single tweet is that there is a need for systemic changes within the peer review process.

There is no shortage of ideas for how to improve the process for the benefit of scholars and the broader public. However, it will be up to journals, publishers and universities to put them into practice and create a more accountable, fair and inclusive system.

The authors would like to thank Emily Rainsford, David V. Smith and Yumin Lu for their contribution to the original article Towards improving peer review: Crowd-sourced insights from Twitter.The Conversation

Kelly-Ann Allen, Associate Professor, School of Educational Psychology and Counselling, Faculty of Education, Monash University; Jonathan Reardon, , Durham University; Joseph Crawford, Senior Lecturer, Educational Innovation, University of Tasmania, and Lucas Walsh, Professor and Director of the Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice, Monash University.

28/02/2023

The Lensa photo and video editing app has shot into social media prominence in recent weeks, after adding a feature that lets you generate stunning digital portraits of yourself in contemporary art styles.

It does that for just a small fee and the effort of uploading 10 to 20 different photographs of yourself.

2022 has been the year text-to-media AI technology left the labs and started colonizing our visual culture, and Lensa may be the slickest commercial application of that technology to date.

It has lit a fire among social media influencers looking to stand out – and a different kind of fire among the art community. Australian artist Kim Leutwyler told The Guardian she recognized the styles of particular artists – including her own style – in Lensa's portraits.

Since Midjourney, OpenAI's Dall-E, and the CompVis group's Stable Diffusion burst onto the scene earlier this year, the ease with which individual artists' styles can be emulated has sounded warning bells.

Artists feel their intellectual property – and perhaps a bit of their soul – has been compromised. But has it?

Well, not as far as existing copyright law sees it.

If it's not direct theft, what is it?
Text-to-media AI is inherently very complicated, but it is possible for us non-computer-scientists to understand conceptually.

To really grasp the positives and negatives of Lensa, it's worth taking a couple of steps back to understand how artists' individual styles can find their way into, and out of, the black boxes that power systems like Lensa.

Lensa is essentially a streamlined and customized front-end for the freely available Stable Diffusion deep learning model. It's so named because it uses a system called latent diffusion to power its creative output.

The word "latent" is key here. In data science, a latent variable is a quality that can't be measured directly, but can be inferred from things that can be measured.

When Stable Diffusion was being built, machine-learning algorithms were fed a large number of image-text pairs, and they taught themselves billions of different ways these images and captions could be connected.

This formed a complex knowledge base, none of which is directly intelligible to humans. We might see "modernism" or "thick ink" in its outputs, but Stable Diffusion sees a universe of numbers and connections.

And all of this derives from complex mathematics involving the numbers generated from the original image-text pairs.

Because the system ingested both descriptions and image data, it lets us plot a course through the enormous sea of possible outputs by typing in meaningful prompts.

Take the image below as an example. The text prompt included the terms "digital art" and "artstation" – a site that's home to many contemporary digital artists.

During its training, Stable Diffusion learnt to associate these words with certain qualities it identified in the various artworks it was trained on. The result is an image that would fit well on ArtStation.

A fake ArtStation-style portrait of a person with dark hair in a bun, made in Stable Diffusion.
A fake ArtStation-style portrait made in Stable Diffusion could fit perfectly on the website. (Stable Diffusion)
What makes Lensa stand out?
So if Stable Diffusion is a text-to-image system where we navigate through different possibilities, then Lensa seems quite different since it takes in images, not words. That's because one of Lensa's biggest innovations is streamlining the process of textual inversion.

Lensa takes user-supplied photos and injects them into Stable Diffusion's existing knowledge base, teaching the system how to "capture" the user's features so it can then stylise them. While this can be done in the regular Stable Diffusion, it's far from a streamlined process.

Although you can't push the images on Lensa in any particular desired direction, the trade-off is a wide variety of options that are almost always impressive. These images borrow ideas from other artists' work, but do not contain any actual snippets of their work.

The Australian Arts Law Centre makes it clear that while individual artworks are subject to copyright, the stylistic elements and ideas behind them are not. Similarly, the Dave Grossman Designs Inc. v Bortin case in the US established that copyright law does not apply to an art style.

What about the artists?
Nonetheless, the fact that art styles and techniques are now transferable in this way is immensely disruptive and extremely upsetting for artists. As technologies like Lensa become more mainstream and artists feel increasingly ripped-off, there may be pressure for legislation to adapt to it.

For artists who work on small-scale jobs, such as creating digital illustrations for influencers or other web enterprises, the future looks challenging.

However, while it is easy to make an artwork that looks good using AI, it's still difficult to create a very specific work, with a specific subject and context. So regardless of how apps like Lensa shake up the way art is made, the personality of the artist remains an important context for their work.

It may be that artists themselves will need to borrow a page from the influencer's handbook and invest more effort in publicizing themselves.

It's early days, and it's going to be a tumultuous decade for producers and consumers of art. But one thing is for sure: the genie is out of the bottle.

25/02/2023

Magic mushrooms refers to a wide variety of fungi containing the psychedelic compound psilocybin.

Though hundreds of varieties of fungi are theoretically capable of producing the chemical, only a small handful of species within the genus Psilocybe are typically consumed for their hallucinogenic properties. Based on archaeological evidence of the mushrooms represented in art, it's likely humans have been using members of the genus in rituals for at least 3,500 years.

What are magic mushrooms?
Of all Psilocybe species, Psilocybe cubensis is today most commonly prized as a recreational drug. Also referred to as golden cap, this tiny, tan to golden-yellow mushroom grows in nutrient-rich pastures and soils around the world, largely in tropical regions of the Americas, Southeast Asia, and Australasia.

Users of the psychedelic mushroom tend to consume one or two grams of dried mushroom rehydrated in foods and teas, or less commonly as a liquid extract of psychoactive compounds. Effects of a few grams of mushrooms can take between 15 minutes and half an hour to kick in, and generally last four to six hours.

What effects do magic mushrooms have on people?
Together with psilocybin, several psychedelic compounds in P. cubensis generate a variety of sensory and emotional responses in the brain, depending on how much is consumed, the concentration of the active substances, and the person's own body.

Much as with L*D, people who consume the psychedelic often experience visual distortions, with light sources adopting a halo effect, and colors becoming more vivid.

What is a magic mushroom 'trip'?
Shapes can seem to shift and change, reflecting an optical illusion effect, while at high doses perception can falsely interpret images to fabricate hallucinations. Measures of time can also be affected, with short periods seeming to take much longer to occur.

On an emotional level, the mushroom increases euphoria and pleasure, promoting a sense of peace. In many cases there is a dream-like disconnect from reality, sometimes accompanied by drowsiness and confused thinking.

Physiologically the psychedelic compounds dilate the pupils, and stimulate the digestive system to produce feelings of nausea, sometimes to the point of vomiting.

Magic mushrooms can cause some people, particularly those with anxiety or bipolar disorders, to experience high levels of paranoia, or respond to hallucinations with extreme fear – what is referred to as a 'bad trip'.

Are magic mushrooms dangerous?
P. cubensis has a low toxicity, and is considered to be relatively harmless when compared to the potential health effects of many other drugs.

Yet as with any illicit substance that can affect how our bodies function, there are risks.

For some people, the experience won't be all that pleasant, triggering psychological distress, dizziness, weakness, and stomach upset. Depending on existing mental health issues, this could trigger trauma, or ongoing recurrences such as flashbacks.

Carrying out certain activities while under the psychedelic's influence, such as swimming or driving, puts individuals at higher risk of accidents.

Then there are the risks taken to get high in the first place. Foraging for mushrooms – magic or other – can result in chowing down on a deadly variety, for example. While recklessly delivering doses of psilocybin in other ways, such as through the end of a syringe, presents its own potentially lethal health risks.

Legally speaking, psilocybin is a prohibited substance in many places around the globe, leading to anything from fines to jail time for possessing or trafficking magic mushrooms. This is slowly changing, with jurisdictions decriminalising possession of small amounts of the psychedelic in recent years.

How do magic mushrooms affect the brain?
Our body breaks psilocybin down into the chemical psilocin, which also happens to be another psychoactive compound found in P. cubensis. It's actually psilocin that affects our nervous system, competing with other messenger chemicals in activating several different types of serotonin receptors known as 5-HT receptors.

It's this competition that interferes with the functioning of areas of the brain involved in the management of a wide variety of functions, from mood to temperature control, to appetite, to excitation of the senses. By affecting levels of another neurotransmitter, called glutamate, in areas of the brain involved in thought and self-esteem, the compound can shift our perspective on our sense of self and how we are connected to our environment.

A more general response to these shifts in brain chemistry seems to be a restructuring of neural networks, suggesting psychedelics like psilocybin seem to 'reset' how the brain is wired on a fundamental level.

Do magic mushrooms treat depression?
Researchers are discovering carefully regulated doses of psilocybin in a monitored environment, alongside guided psychotherapy, could be as effective in managing depression as leading antidepressants, with fewer side effects.

What's more, by affecting the way brain cells connect, it could be a medication that has long term benefits for treating mood disorders.

However, more research needs to be done to determine how effective the treatment is for large groups of people, as well as how safe and effective it is over long periods of time.

23/02/2023

It can be tempting to think that the recent wildfire disasters in communities across the West were unlucky, one-off events, but evidence is accumulating that points to a trend.

In a new study, we found a 246 percent increase in the number of homes and structures destroyed by wildfires in the contiguous Western US between the past two decades, 1999-2009 and 2010-2020.

This trend is strongly influenced by major fires in 2017, 2018 and 2020, including destructive fires in Paradise and Santa Rosa, California, and in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington.

In fact, in nearly every Western state, more homes and buildings were destroyed by wildfire over the past decade than the decade before, revealing increasing vulnerability to wildfire disasters.

What explains the increasing home and structure loss?

Surprisingly, it's not just the trend of burning more area, or simply more homes being built where fires historically burned. While those trends play a role, increasing home and structure loss is outpacing both.

As fire scientists, we have spent decades studying the causes and impacts of wildfires, in both the recent and more distant past. It's clear that the current wildfire crisis in the Western US has human fingerprints all over it.

In our view, now more than ever, humanity needs to understand its role.

Wildfires are becoming more destructive
From 1999 to 2009, an average of 1.3 structures were destroyed for every 4 square miles burned (1,000 hectares, or 10 square kilometers). This average more than doubled to 3.4 during the following decade, 2010-2020.

Nearly every Western state lost more structures for every square mile burned, with the exception of New Mexico and Arizona.

Graph showing trends in structure losses due to wildfires
Adapted from Higuera, et al., PNAS Nexus 2023, CC BY
Humans increasingly cause destructive wildfires
Given the damage from the wildfires you hear about on the news, you may be surprised to learn that 88 percent of wildfires in the West over the past two decades destroyed zero structures. This is, in part, because the majority of area burned (65 percent) is still due to lightning-ignited wildfires, often in remote areas.

But among wildfires that do burn homes or other structures, humans play a disproportionate role – 76 percent over the past two decades were started by unplanned human-related ignitions, including backyard burning, downed power lines, and campfires. The area burned from human-related ignitions rose 51 percent between 1999-2009 and 2010-2020.

This is important because wildfires started by human activities or infrastructure have vastly different impacts and characteristics that can make them more destructive.

Unplanned human ignitions typically occur near buildings and tend to burn in grasses that dry out easily and burn quickly. And people have built more homes and buildings in areas surrounded by flammable vegetation, with the number of structures up by 40 percent over the past two decades across the West, with every state contributing to the trend.

Human-caused wildfires also expand the fire season beyond the summer months when lightning is most common, and they are particularly destructive during late summer and fall when they overlap with periods of high winds.

As a result, of all the wildfires that destroy structures in the West, human-caused events typically destroy over 10 times more structures for every square mile burned, compared to lighting-caused events.

Maps of where wildfires have burned in 21st century in Western US
Adapted from Higuera, et al., PNAS Nexus 2023, CC BY
The December 2021 Marshall Fire that destroyed more than 1,000 homes and buildings in the suburbs near Boulder, Colorado, fit this pattern to a T. Powerful winds sent the fire racing through neighborhoods and vegetation that was unusually dry for late December.

As human-caused climate change leaves vegetation more flammable later into each year, the consequences of accidental ignitions are magnified.

Putting out all fires isn't the answer
This might make it easy to think that if we just put out all fires, we would be safer. Yet a focus on stopping wildfires at all costs is, in part, what got the West into its current predicament. Fire risks just accumulate for the future.

The amount of flammable vegetation has increased in many regions because of an absence of burning due to emphasizing fire suppression, preventing Indigenous fire stewardship and a fear of fire in any context, well exemplified by Smokey Bear.

Putting out every fire quickly removes the positive, beneficial effects of fires in Western ecosystems, including clearing away hazardous fuels so future fires burn less intensely.

How to reduce risk of destructive wildfires
The good news is that people have the ability to affect change, now. Preventing wildfire disasters necessarily means minimizing unplanned human-related ignitions. And it requires more than Smokey Bear's message that "only you can prevent forest fires." Infrastructure, like downed power lines, has caused some of the deadliest wildfires in recent years.

Reducing wildfire risks across communities, states, and regions requires transformative changes beyond individual actions. We need innovative approaches and perspectives for how we build, provide power, and manage lands, as well as mechanisms that ensure changes work across socioeconomic levels.

Graph showing how wildfires and structure loss vary by state
Adapted from Higuera, et al., PNAS Nexus 2023, CC BY
Actions to reduce risk will vary, since how people live and how wildfires burn vary widely across the West.

States with large tracts of land with little development, like Idaho and Nevada, can accommodate widespread burning, largely from lighting ignition, with little structure loss.

California and Colorado, for example, require different approaches and priorities. Growing communities can carefully plan if and how they build in flammable landscapes, support wildfire management for risks and benefits, and improve firefighting efforts when wildfires do threaten communities.

Climate change remains the elephant in the room. Left unaddressed, warmer, drier conditions will exacerbate challenges of living with wildfires. And yet we can't wait. Addressing climate change can be paired with reducing risks immediately to live more safely in an increasingly flammable West.The Conversation

Philip Higuera, Professor of Fire Ecology, University of Montana; Jennifer Balch, Associate Professor of Geography and Director, Earth Lab, University of Colorado Boulder; Maxwell Cook, Ph.D. Student, Dept. of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder, and Natasha Stavros, Director of the Earth Lab Analytics Hub, University of Colorado Boulder

21/02/2023

There's no doubt that modern science owes the 17th century English polymath Sir Isaac Newton some gratitude. You don't get a whole unit of force named after you for nothing.

But if you're feeling guilty that your time in isolation hasn't been as productive as his was reported to have been, go easy on yourself; his Annus Mirabilis wasn't as mirabilis as you might think.

In a year short on inspiration and big on staring wistfully out of windows in hopes that 2021 has a little less plague, smoke, and partisan politics, we can't blame some science celebrity types for trying to paint a silver lining on events.

Earlier this year, Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted this nugget of history in his usual humorous fashion.

Not to be outdone, Richard Dawkins offered the same snippet of trivia just recently.

To give a bit more background, Isaac Newton was a fresh-faced student in his early 20s attending Trinity College at the University of Cambridge when bubonic plague forced his school to shut down in 1665.

So back home he went, where for the next year or so he spent his downtime being a general genius, pumping out revelation after revelation. Exactly what he did depends on whom you ask, but it often includes mentions of gravity, forces, optics, and calculus.

It's a tale that's been repeated often over the years, but now that we're all getting first-hand experience of a pandemic that will go down in history, Newton's story has been doing the rounds once more.

We all love an inspiring story of discovery, and scientists aren't immune. But in recounting the story of Newton's 'miraculous year', important details can often be glossed over, in order to focus on the hero's role.

Newton himself may have considered it a rather productive period. An 1888 publication quotes him listing his achievements in the years 1665 and 1666, claiming "[f]or in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention".

Even if we don't go on his word, we can still be confident that his time was well occupied by studies in mathematics. He wrote a summary of everything he'd learned in the October of 1666, which included the seeds of what we now know as calculus. Hardly the work of an idle mind.

But here those glossed-over details become important. Science historian Thony Christie has all of the finer points spelled out at The Renaissance Mathematicus, a blog that is well worth your time reading.

Far from 'inventing calculus', Newton spent that time summarising centuries of work on the topic, collating and expanding upon it in a project that would extend far beyond a few pestilence-cursed years.

This isn't to trivialise the leaps made, or to downplay Newton's mathematical talents in the field's development. Rather, it can only be appreciated as a chapter preceded by the works of giants like Archimedes, Bonaventura Cavalieri, Johannes Kepler, and John Wallis.

This is a theme we see repeated in Newton's other passions. Gorging himself on the works of giants like Descartes, Kepler, Galileo, and Ibn al-Haytham, he tidied, tweaked, and toyed with the thoughts left by previous mathematicians and philosophers.

Many of those tweaks would grow into revolutions. Newton's insight into the universal nature of gravity (whether or not it was inspired by a falling apple) had consequences far beyond the field of physics, for example. His experiments on the nature of light would figuratively introduce colour to the world.

Those few golden years spent at home, far from Cambridge's desolate halls, almost certainly helped lay the foundations for future decades of work.

So where's the lie? If Newton was a busy bee in 1666, why can't we all draw some inspiration from his endeavours in our own moment of virtuous solitude?

If Isaac Newton is your muse for solving the Hubble constant problem, crunching the twin prime conjecture, and inventing a low-fat brownie that actually tastes good, all before breakfast, all the more power to you.

To Newton, his studies weren't novel hobbies filling suddenly vacant hours – they were continuations of a passion that persisted beyond a few short years of plague, afforded by the relative privilege he enjoyed, which also included having servants do the household chores.

His interest in the mathematics that contributed to the drawn-out invention of calculus can be traced to frustration over efforts to decipher a book on astrology he'd picked up at a fair. Even the extensive catalogue of topics that would occupy his mind through those years had already been listed in his notes long before there were whispers of plague.

MIT science writer Thomas Levenson summed it up perfectly in an article he wrote earlier this year for The New Yorker:

"Newton was able to do what he did not because of where he happened to find himself during the plague but because of who he was – one of the handful of greatest mathematicians and natural philosophers of all time, who, for several years, was able to do almost nothing else with his time but think, reason, and calculate."

Stories we tell about scientific discovery aren't merely celebrations of the past, but models of how we perform research today and into the future. We aspire to live up to those expectations, and suffer a sense of failure when we fall short of them.

As much as adversity can bring opportunity, there is no reason to suspect Newton's time at home was in any way comparable with the isolation many of us face in 2020.

His story deserves to be shared not as a pivotal moment at a bleak time in history, but as a significant link in a chain of enlightenment. One that continues to evolve thanks to the dedication of every single scientist, engineer, and thinker today. Even if they don't have miraculous years.

Good life world

02/03/2023

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