At times we have had to be subjected to various types of home quarantines to cause of an epidemic. The psychological and sociological consequences of this have been, naturally, negative, but also positive, as we see below.
During the Plague, for example, home confinement and social distancing surely favored geniuses like Shakespeare either Newton so that, surrounded by time, tranquility, silence and other elements inappropriate to the hectic social life, lwill carry out some of their masterpieces.
Newton's Quarantine
In Japan there is a unique phenomenon in the world in which teenagers generally decide to cloister themselves in their room and not come out for weeks or months, the Hikikomori. Also in the West we are accustomed to cases of monks or others who decide to become anchorites, isolating themselves for a while or forever from the world. But it is the first time in recent history that many of us are going to be forced to stay for a long time within four walls (although we now have a fifth in the form of a screen that allows us to see much further).
Perhaps we can draw some motivation from other quarantine stories whose results were more than remarkable. It is the case of Isaac Newton, who during the plague quarantine of 1665, made some of his greatest contributions to Physics.
Newton was in his early 20s when the Great Plague of London devastated the city.. He was just another undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. And it would be another 200 years before scientists discovered the bacteria that caused the plague. But even without knowing exactly why, people practiced some of the same things we do to avoid illness.
To ensure social distancing, Cambridge sent students home to continue their studies. For Newton, that meant going to Woolsthorpe Manor, the family farm a few miles northwest of Cambridge. He then acquired some prisms and experimented with them in his room, even making a hole in his blinds so that only a small ray could pass through. From this arose his theories on optics. It was one of the advantages of having time to meditate and experiment in comfort and without structured classes.
In London, a quarter of the population would die from the Plague between 1665 and 1666. It was one of the last major outbreaks in the 400 years that the Black Death devastated Europe. Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667, theories in hand. Two years later, Newton became a professor.
For its part, during a plague quarantine of 1605, William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth and E.l King Lear. "The plague was the most powerful force that shaped his life and that of his contemporaries," he wrote. Jonathan Bate, one of his many biographers. The plague closed London's theaters. Shakespeare felt that writing was the best use of his time. "This meant that his days were free, for the first time since the early 1590s, to collaborate with other playwrights," he writes. James S. Shapiro in his book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.
We may be condemned to be within four walls (or five), but our minds never will be.
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The news
Living in quarantine was a stimulus for Newton to change the history of Physics
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.