If you are any kind of math or science nerd, you will most likely recall that various physical phenomenon including electro-magnetism, gravity and light follow an inverse square law. That is, the phenomenon diminishes in intensity as a function of the square of the distance from which we experience it. A light that has brightness X at a given distance is only 1/4th as bright at twice that distance. The same is true of the strength of gravitational or magnetic attraction, and so forth. The underpinning of the inverse square laws is the notion that, if we assume that the phenomenon arises from a singularity, a point source, and is omnidirectional in its effect, then that effect is distributed over a spherical surface of size 4 x Pi x R-squared; where R is the distance from which we measure its effect.
I don’t often think about inverse square laws; they are simply part of the unstated mathematics that applies to everything around me. But today, I read an item about a young couple who were COVID vaccine refusers and contracted COVID because they had firmly held socio-political beliefs – despite the urgings to vaccinate from some of their closest relatives. This is a common story of our time, of course. They both contracted the illness. He, a healthy 30-something police officer, did well. She was not so fortunate. She was 18-weeks into a pregnancy, and her ordeal led to some five months of hospitalization, strokes, a C-section to save her baby, and about two months on ECMO (extra-corporal membrane oxygenation). The internet is replete with such stories; all of them are tragic, and many are sadder than this one.
The intersection of the physics of inverse square laws and this tragic human story is that I often wonder whether human suffering and tragedy don’t also follow an inverse square type of law. I’ve posted before that we are all cousins – whether we are first cousins or twentieth cousins, we are all related and members of a single and wonderfully diverse species. I often think of our relationships in a manner akin to the game of “X-degrees of Kevin Bacon.” When we experience tragedy and suffering in a first degree relative, it is REAL to us. The loss of a parent, a spouse or a child is excruciatingly intimate. When the same loss occurs among distant cousins, we seem to experience it less acutely. The anguish caused by the loss of countless thousands and even millions scattered over the nations of the earth seems to affect many of us much less than the loss of one intimate relationship. It is a tragic puzzle, to be sure.
I am reminded of John Donne’s poem, “No Man is an Island,” as well as of Stalin’s quote that, “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” The tragic heroes in the COVID story that I read today are slowly healing. They have reached out to all of their closest relatives who were vaccine refusers. I am sure that they have had a positive effect on those relations, but what of those distant relations in faraway places? What of them? The inverse square law will attenuate the meaning of their personal suffering just as the stories of pain and suffering from across the world seemed to have had no effect on them.
Make no mistake; I love mathematics and physics, but in situations like this, not so much.