Carl Zimmer

It's not airborne.

until they said it was airborne.

And that just seemed like not quantum physics.

You know what I'm saying?

In the sense that it seemed like that would be the kind of thing that would get sorted out pretty quickly.

And I think that actually more spoke to my own unfamiliarity with the depth of this field.

And so I would talk to experts, like say Donald Milton, University of Maryland, I'd be like,

So help me understand this.

How did this happen?

And he would say, well, you need to get to know some people like William Wells.

And I said, who?

Yeah, yeah, that's what I thought.

Yeah, there were just a whole bunch of people from a century ago or more that have been forgotten.

They've been lost to history, and yet they were real people.

visionaries, but they were also incredibly embattled.

And the question of how we messed up understanding why COVID was airborne turned out to have an answer that took me back thousands of years and really plunged me into this whole science that's known as aerobiology.

Well, it's certainly some of the earliest evidence we have that people were looking at the air and thinking about the air and thinking there's something about the air that matters to us.

Aristotle thought, well, there's clearly something important about the air.

Like life just seems to be revolve around breathing.

And he didn't know why.