Simulation of Epidemics

Abstract

Scientists can be distinguished from others who try to improve the human condition by their striving to understand thoroughly how something works. People in many pursuits work to control outcomes, while the scientist works to understand, often reducing a phenomenon to its parts, experimenting with the parts until they are understood, and then assembling understandings of the simpler parts into an understanding of the more complex whole. Therefore, mathematical simulation, which I conceive here as the logical assembly of knowledge of the interrelations among pathogen, host and weather for calculating the course of epidemics, can be placed in the center of plant pathology because it is an orderly, if trying, way of assembling our fundamental knowledge of the parts of epidemics into an understanding of whole epidemics. Although perfect knowledge and perfect simulation is beyond our grasp, we can already make good use of the fundamental pathology that we have in order to analyze, simulate and predict epidemics, to test the adequacy of present pathology, to be surprised sometimes at how well we do, and always to illuminate the importance or insignificance of lacunae in our knowledge.