Read It | The Invisible Rainbow

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A history of electricity and life.

Yeah, I know, sounds like a snooze fest, right?

Not to me!

​This book is fascinating beyond words and at around 70 pages in, it gets into the guts of what this book is really about. The effects of electricity on our health and its relation to the flu. Cue most people rolling their eyes. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the people who think they know the most have almost always done the least research.

​Bye you basic Felicias.

A lot of us have probably seen this meme floating around social media

I always wondered what the deal was with it and why anyone would think that something like the flu, that's been around for as long as history has been recorded could have any connection with new technology like cell towers. And, I filed the whole theory under "there could be something there but seems extremely unlikely." Where I think most people would only see "crazy". I've learned that this is a huge, fascinating, and often surprising world where we shouldn't blindly rule out most things no matter how crazy they seem.

If you check out sources on this phenomena like Reuters, they'll tell you it's false as hell. I don't trust "fact checkers" anymore in this era where everyone seems to be bought, I'd rather do research myself and come to my own conclusions using critical thinking. Something that used to be encouraged and a sign a being a reasonable human being but is now an act of rebellion in today's society. And can easily make you a figurative witch to be burned at the stake. 

Anyway, I find all the fact-checking sites ruling this false as odd because The Invisible Rainbow is as thick as a dictionary and over 1/4 of it is the bibliography. Could it still be BS? Sure. But, let's dig into one little thing.

​What I found particularly interesting was the section on virologist Robert Edgar Hope-Simpson whose career spanned 71 years and was one of the world's authorities on the epidemiology of influenza who, toward the end of his career in 1992, still had so many questions about the flu like:

• Why do flu epidemics end?
• Why don't out-of-season epidemics spread?
• How do epidemics explode over whole countries at once, and disappear just as miraculously, as if suddenly prohibited?
• How is it possible that flu epidemics traveled at the same blinding speed in the past centuries as they do today?
• How does the virus accomplish its so-called "vanishing trick"?

Robert had another theory about the vanishing trick, one that's taken more seriously, and that is vitamin D. Even if this is correct, it only answers one aspect of the many mysterious questions listed above (and more that aren't listed). As you read through the book and explore these other mysteries of flus, you begin to see that there very well appears to be other factors at play...

If you want to go down the rabbit hole even further...

I thought of this book a lot while listening to this podcast.
​The interview begins at the 10 minute mark if you aren't feeling the intro.