“Coronavirus Presents Millennials With A Generational Moment”

Atop Mt. Wilson — This dome atop Mount Wilson houses the telescope used by Edwin Hubble when he discovered the general expansion of the universe. Along with Mount Palomar to the south, it was one of the principal places where Hubble’s great student and my longtime San Gabriel neighbor Allen Sandage did much of his work. Mount Wilson was perhaps the principal and most familiar feature of my natural environment. I saw it nearly every day of my childhood and youth. I visited it (and Mount Palomar) multiple times with my family, on school fieldtrips, and even on dates.
(NASA public domain photograph)

I’m shocked and dismayed at the number of people who still don’t appear to be taking COVID-19 seriously. For those — and especially for the young and, therefore, the immortal among them — I offer some links. The first, especially, should be rather sobering:

“Modeling study suggests 18 months of COVID-19 social distancing, much disruption”

“Coronavirus presents millennials with a generational moment”

“An open letter to my peers partying on the beach”

“CNN’s Tapper to people defying social distancing: ‘Who the hell are you?'”

“Some children can develop serious illnesses from the coronavirus: A new study suggests children are at risk, too”

But here’s a bit of inspiration, written not during our current troubles but for the BBC back in 2015:

“Did this sleepy village stop the Great Plague? Today, tourists amble through the pretty village of Eyam. But 350 years ago, during the plague, the town’s terrible sacrifice meant its streets were filled with the wails of the dying”

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And now I transition from the very small and invisible to the chronologically far distant and virtually unimaginable:

The following two quotations come from Richard Panek, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Mariner Books, 2011). They refer to the MIT theoretical physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth:

According to his calculations, the universe had gone through a monumental expansion in its first moment of existence. At the age of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one second – or 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000 th of a second – the universe had expanded ten septillion-fold – or to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times its previous size. (126)

Guth found that if you apply that transformation mathematically to the conditions of the early universe, the phase transition would have produced a temporary vacuum. That vacuum, in turn, would have produced a negative pressure – a strong gravitational repulsion – that would have expanded space exponentially. The universe would have doubled in size, then doubled in size again, then doubled in size yet again. It would have done this at least a hundred times, and it would have done so over the course of 10^-35seconds (or 1/10³⁵). After that, the vacuum would have decayed, the exponential expansion would have stopped, and the standard expansion of the universe – the one in the Big Bang theory that we can see for ourselves in the redshifting of the light from distant galaxies – would have begun. (127)

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In other news:

For roughly thirty hours, thus far, the message board where my Malevolent Stalker, his mendacious wannabe the Mini-Stalker, and several others have anonymously published their work for approximately a decade and a half has been down. Now, I know that I should have more sympathy. But I frankly think it’s rather pleasant that, for part of two days now — to pick up just a few of the Peterson-related themes that were really, literally, trending on the board immediately before it went down — they’ve been unable to continue with their earnest discussions not only of such standard-issue topics as my 2012 purging from the Maxwell Institute, my mean-spiritedness, greed, dishonesty, physical ugliness, racism, and hatred of homosexuals; the viciousness of this blog; and the embarrassingly low quality of the Interpreter Foundation’s yet-unreleased Witnesses film; but of how, by distracting one of its central participants from his urgent professional work, this blog has interfered with Utah’s response to the coronavirus, and how my hatred and fear of science, if they were to spread to the general public, would make fighting COVID-19 almost impossible, and how I need to be more charitable to others.

So far as I’m aware, I haven’t yet been determined to be the cause of Utah’s recent earthquake or the locust plague in Africa and the Middle East.