Sight: Technology has yet to devise a perpetual motion machine, but Covid has invented a perpetual motion vaccine

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Visitors to Scotland are often puzzled by the locals: When will the painting of the bridge spanning the Firth of Forth estuary be completed? Answer: never. Because apparently the deck is so long that as soon as the paint job is finished from one end to the other, the side where the work started needs a fresh coat of paint. The never-ending task of painting the Firth of Forth bridge finds a parallel in the world’s ongoing coronavirus vaccination program.

Although a handful of smaller countries, such as Israel, report having inoculated 100% of their eligible population, hundreds of millions in Africa and other parts of the world are yet to receive even the first injection of a two-dose vaccine. Additionally, in some countries, such as the United States, people are given booster doses, as vaccines so far developed are believed to provide not lifelong immunity but protection for only a few months. So when the last batch of people on Earth are vaccinated, the first batch will need the third, fourth, fifth vaccinations, and so on.

While well-meaning organizations such as the WHO may wring their hands in unfortunate dismay at this endless state of affairs, mathematicians and mythologists shrug their shoulders at this self-evident proposition that applies to all spheres of the human scheme of things, and it is summarized briefly in the Greek story of Sisyphus.

The cunning king of Corinth has twice deceived death by deceit. A vengeful Zeus, angered by such deadly recklessness, delivered the crook to Hades, where his eternal punishment was to push a large boulder up a steep hill only to roll it down once he reached the top, forcing Sisyphus to start his work again. . In 1942, Albert Camus interpreted the myth of Sisyphus as the inevitable existentialist acceptance of the inherent absurdity that underlies the human condition, permeating such realms of apparent certainty as mathematics.

A well-known mathematical conundrum, or paradox, sees Achilles attempting to overtake a tortoise that is one meter ahead of him. The Greek hero will halve the distance between himself and the slow quadruped. He will then quarter the distance, then reduce it to an eighth, in an infinite series of subdivisions, which ensures that the great warrior can never reach the heads.

It is not only the ancient Greeks who are assailed by such endless tasks. In his writings, Bertrand Russell recounts how, as a somewhat arrogant young man, he took upon himself the challenge of solving what has become known as the problem of sets. Put simply, all entities can be of two types: one that can be collectivized into a whole; and one that is unique and not part of a set. But do these unset types not fit into the set of unset entities? After spending weeks unsuccessfully struggling with his self-proclaimed mission impossible, and sharing his attempts with other logicians – such as Alfred North Whitehead who, quoting Robert Browning, sadly wrote to Russell, “Never happier and more confident” – he surrendered. .

In his 1979 book, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter proposed the concept of what he called a “strange cycle” in the functioning of what we call “reality”. Drawing extensively from the works of logician Kurt Godel, composer Johann Sebastian Bach, artist MC Escher, and writer-mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll), Hofstadter explained the loops – or loopholes – in the fabric of reality that confuses logic.

In his 2007 book, I Am A Strange Loop, Hofstadter defined a strange cycle as an “elusive notion” of a “closed loop” in which “despite the sense of moving further and further away from one’s origin, one ends up, with surprise, In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level crossing. ”And like many other things, the Covid vaccination process falls prey to this strange madness.

While technology has yet to devise a perpetual motion machine, a microscopic insect has invented a perpetual motion vaccine. How crazy can you get?

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