I used to be uncertain about things, but now I'm not so sure

I have no idea whether this is a “real” picture - who knows anything these days? But given the sheer idiocy of some the things I’ve witnessed I’m prepared to believe this pool class adopted these covid-safe™ measures.

Look at how stupid being certain has made some people.

The certainty that a plastic screen makes some kind of difference in the endless fight against this apocalyptic virus, this Ragnarokarona, has resulted in this delightfully bonkers behaviour.

I think I’m irretrievably weird. I crave uncertainty. If there’s something I don’t understand, it means I have something to learn - and that’s a great thing.

Maybe it’s because I love physics. In my PhysicsI class (basic mechanics), I used to ask my students the following question : how would you go about measuring the speed of a bullet? There were lots of interesting answers to this question from the students, but I love the “textbook” answer. It’s so cool (yes, I am weird).

Basically, you hang a lump of clay from a string and fire the bullet into it. The bullet is stopped by the clay and the whole thing swings up a bit. By measuring the height of the swing (or the angle) you can then figure out the speed of the bullet using conservation laws (energy and momentum). It’s a standard textbook example known as a “ballistic pendulum”.

Stuff like this takes my fancy and gives it a good old tickle. I never ceased to find a kind of wonder in this example - no matter how many times I taught it. It’s amazing that we can take a few very simple principles, codify it all using maths, and figure out stuff like this. There’s a kind of magic going on here that all too often gets relegated and forgotten about.

If you kick a football you can see that it goes up and comes down again in a very characteristic shape - like an inverted bowl (technically it’s a parabola). What is a miracle is that we can take rulers and a stopwatch and ask questions like how high is the football at some time, how far has it travelled (horizontal distance) in that same time? We write these as y(t) and x(t), respectively. Just a shorthand way of compressing all those words into symbols. What is miraculous is that when we do this, we can find a very simple mathematical relationship between the x and the y.

Every time anyone kicks a football, anywhere in the world, the football follows this same basic mathematical shape. That’s a powerful statement. It points to an underlying order, an underlying pattern, that governs the motion of footballs the world over.

There’s a pattern to this ‘pandemic’ too. An underlying order. Joel Smalley, in my view, has done a very significant piece of work here. He has been able to take the mortality curves (UK data) and find an empirical model that fits the data very well. Why is this significant?

It’s significant because what Joel has done is to find a single, reasonably simple, mathematical curve (essentially the Gompertz curve) that can be used to model the data. You add up just a very few of these curves in the appropriate way and, hey presto, the whole more complex real-world data is reproduced.

It’s like what is done in Fourier Analysis. If you think about what happens when a sound is produced it’s “made up” of a whole bunch of simple oscillations all added together. These oscillations all have different frequencies and when you add these simple “pure” oscillations together in the right way a much more complex sound wave can be generated.

In this picture you can see the three simple oscillations (at 100Hz, 200Hz and 300Hz) all added together to give the more complicated pattern (solid line, bottom graph).

Joel, I think, has found these simpler infection curves that, when added together, give a good description of a more complicated pandemic curve. It’s significant because it indicates there is an underlying order here, an underlying pattern - just like the parabolic motion of a football indicates there is an underlying order.

Here’s an example of this being applied to England mortality during the first 2 covid seasons (and it also models flu deaths in the winter prior to the covid outbreak)

It’s the mathematical representation of the statement the virus gonna virus.

There’s much I don’t yet understand about Joel’s work - which is not to say there’s anything wrong - it’s just an expression of my own ignorance. But it’s exciting as hell.

This is what happens when talented people, like Joel, ask questions and try to answer them. It’s what happens when there is uncertainty. It’s what happens when people don’t mindlessly follow some prescribed set of assumptions. It’s what happens when people don’t follow the SCIENCE™

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