What Does Space Have To Do With Disease?

On yet another snowy Colorado day, today's guide is more of a thought experiment that shows a hidden relationship between the skies and the spread of a pandemic.

Our brains are adapted to have an intuitive understanding of the world around us, and over time we established a language to describe the behaviors we observe in the natural world. That language is mathematics, and it’s the foundation of every scientific discipline. In a broad sense you can think of math as being similar to language, and physics/chemistry/biology/etc. are the stories crafted with that language.

But as good as our brains are at intuitively understanding some things, we’re naturally quite poor at others. For example, let’s say you’re stacking a pile of bricks. Two bricks is twice as heavy as one (1 + 1 = 2), simple enough. Now let’s say you had to estimate how heavy a stack of ten bricks is. Even without a precise measurement of how heavy a single brick is, you’d have a good enough sense to multiply that perceived weight by ten and have a good idea if you could lift it yourself or would need to cut it in half or have two people lift it. Mathematically we express this as 1 x 10 = 10.

With addition and multiplication as in these examples, you can rely on your experience and understanding of the world to get a good idea of what the outcome is, mathematically that’s called a prediction. We’re drawing on what you know about how heavy things feel and how those weights interact without each other in the real world in order to develop a reliable intuition.

But what if we take it a step further. If you start with two bricks and are asked to keep doubling the pile of bricks ten times, what does that look like? (Mathematically, this is 2^10) Our intuition breaks down as we don’t have many readily obvious patterns in our daily lives to draw on for reference.

This type of behavior is what’s called exponential growth. It’s actually fairly common in nature. There are different types of exponential growth, for example we measure the immense scale of the universe in powers of ten, our eyes adjust to the intensity of light in powers of ten, our hearing sensitivity adapts in powers of ten, and most topical, disease transmission.

To learn more about how this affects the spread of COVID-19 and see exponential growth in action, check out this excellent demonstration by the visual effects artists in the Corridor Crew.

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Stay well, and clear skies!