What is it that we are so certain about? the time that you would be sleeping? the time you will wake up in the morning? that you will get from A to B in your way of transport in a certain amounts of minutes? that your health will be ok when you travel on an important job? are you certain that what you have promised to do today will happen tomorrow? are you a believer of self sufficiency? that we as individuals can do anything we want in life even if we had lived alone (there are stories that prove this theory, like Hay Ibn Yaqthan and Castaway). Can you say that the plan you had nicely thought about and laid out will work with clear certainty? in accounting for example, we alway put aside a certain amount of money in the budget that we call “contingency” and that will be for things like a stop in production, a disaster that can happen somewhere in the factory or the company and will affect us or so many other things that we are uncertain about.
Mathematics tackle certainty in a totally different way, it actually never says that 1+1 is 2 with absolute and utter certainty, as there could be a .00000001 in the end of the one that will make an absolute 2 never so certain. To date there is no theory in mathematics that tells you that an answer to something is the right answer. Take Nobel Laureate John Nash, his “contribution” was (as Wiki says) “to make fundamental contributions to game theory, differential geometry, and the study of partial differential equations.[2][3] Nash’s work has provided insight into the factors that govern chance and decision-making inside complex systems found in everyday life“. If you read this sentence again you will notice the words “chance”, “decision making” recur many times, which means that you could be working day and night to prove something but at the end it will still be uncertain. We say in universities “I can prove with absolute uncertainty that A is equal to B-Z”. also think about the TOE (the Theory Of Everything) see what my dear Wiki says “A theory of everything (TOE[1] or ToE), final theory, ultimate theory, or master theory is a hypothetical single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe.[2]:6 Finding a TOE is one of the major unsolved problems in physics“. see the word “hypothetical” which means that we can go on and hypothesis as much as we want to, but the black hole will remain a black hole. Which bring me to the subject of todays talk:
What we know for a fact is that since December 2019 the world had been discussing a disease that can be wiped out soon! ok how soon? a month? or two or ten? soon we will end the year, and so far we are having new waves of infections all around. New Zealand celebrated “Zero infections” and opened its borders for those citizens that were stuck outside, and check out what happened, a new wave and new quarantine rules. France had reported 13500 new infections yesterday and so on. Can we say that we will be able to eradicate the disease soon? in my husbands family we had few deaths that are either because of the pandemic or agitated by the pandemic. Many of the people I personally know had died from the pandemic, and still we are seeing other phenomenas.
The only thing that I can see which is certain is the rumours and the conspiracy theories. We had so many of them since the start of the pandemic . To begin with I must start with the anecdote that we forget a lot. The world did have pandemics before; from different types of flu to ebola, aids, malaria, chicken pox, cow pox, polio, you name it and we had it. If one says that I will wake up in the morning feeling absolutely safe and sound, then one is just kidding oneself. We do not know what will happen in a minute let alone in days and years. So lets start:
First we had the Chinese Government who said that USA had sprayed Wuhan with the virus in November 2019, the reason for this theory is that Trump wanted to buy some German research companies that specialises in producing vaccines. Then we had a video which was publish in 2015 saying that we will get a deadly virus and we need to be vaccinated (Bill gates was speaking in that video). The best theory in my mind is the 5G, that it had created and spread the virus. The theory that I didn’t like much is that the world wants to get rid of all of us the oldies (being over 60 is considered old as its the retirement age) I wouldn’t want my mother to die because of a tiny virus. Then there was a Malthusian theory that the world can only handle 5 billion people and somehow we need to get rid of 2.5 billion of us. The one I am very astonished about is that Bill gates wants to be the richest man in the world, so he is making the vaccine (I know that Bill Gates is one of the most charitable people and he had bet his own money to research a vaccine). Ok hear this, so the world can get rid of all the unsuccessful businesses and companies? or to fix spaying cameras in every road, street, alleyway and corner to spy on people; another best one is to change the way we teach and learn. Make the governments approve online learning, or computer manufacturers wants to sell more laptops! ok this one is a first too, that the Arab world make peace with Israel and forget the Palestinian issue. Also we had stopped Haj and other worship places so we had spread negative energy in the world. Of course a very good one is that a lot of people had become ultra rich, like the mask and other sanitising manufacturers. The internet and anything online has certainly taken a good lead in this pandemic, we started to buy everything online (we did that before but with certain limitations) nowadays we do not hesitate to buy a shirt online or even perfume (which we had to smell it before) or lipstick (which we must smudge on our hands). My husband was a believer in touching every cucumber and every tomato before he buys it, now we place our orders online. Thus buying online is something of a conspiracy theory too. Ok, what about social distancing? did we manage to break the social norms with this pandemic? we have zoom meetings, whatsapp groups, we used “Discord” to teach children, and we grouped together to play games and competitions online. My husband (did you notice that I mention him all the time:)) loves Domino game, now he is playing online with people that he doesn’t know (he would never had done so before)
Let me tell you my theory, we may never know with absolute certainty what will happen tomorrow (whether being physicists, mathematicians, politicians or just normal people), we may get infected with the virus, we may live or may die, however we should never ever give up and make ourselves miserable. Life as we know it may never return to its norm (if we knew a norm before) but we should never be “malheureux” or feel miserable and give up on ourselves and others. This is akin to the mask in the airplane theory, put it on first and then help others. We must all collaborate for a better world and forget about the conspiracies. One thing is for sure, there is a God that will protect us in any way he can but we must show him that we care about each other and we must never threw our masks here and there and everywhere as we must protect other living species (sorry about the many musts)
