History Gives Us Hope ➶

Steve Weiner, a former nuclear submarine officer, writing on his personal blog:

History gives us some hope. During the Great Plague of 1665, Isaac Newton – then a student at Cambridge – was forced to leave campus as a precautionary measure, and went to his family estate in the country. There his brain was freed up and he began work on some of the world’s most monumental discoveries: calculus, optics, and gravity. He called the subsequent time his annus mirabilis, his “wonder year”. I’m optimistic that similarly profound achievements are happening in isolation all over the world. Hopefully, we’ll soon have a cure to this fucking thing, but why shouldn’t we also surface from the depths with action plans to eliminate poverty or reverse climate change?

✶ Wednesday, 15 April 2020

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