COVID-19 has been worse than the coronavirus pandemics of 2012 and 2003 yet the air is cleaner than ever, so a new op-ed claiming that 'virtual' pollution - so small you can't see it without an electron microscope - is the reason SARS-CoV-2 has been so bad comes across as silly, and bordering on deceptive.

Even sillier, they claim that 91 percent of planet earth lives in unsafe air.

Muons are leptons(1), fundamental particles formed in the atmosphere by cosmic rays that are a heavier cousin of electrons. The Standard Model has three generations of leptons; electrons, muons, and tau plus their three neutrinos. The Standard Model is in line with "the big bang" and measurements of the hydrogen/helium ratio - because the number of types of neutrinos affects the prevalence of helium.

Things were great, or at least in a kind of intellectual détente on the Standard Model, until recently.

Your risk of death is 100 percent. Yet your risk of early demise can be mitigated if you avoid things like ingesting alcohol and cigarettes and mustard gas.

Those are clear killers. What about salt, sugar, and meat? Those have not been established as science at all, they are instead examples of correlation. To create correlation is easy, it only requires looking at a group of people, finding what diseases they have, finding what foods they eat, and creating a "statistically significant" link between them.

Electric cars are popular, thanks to government mandates and subsidies, but they have a problem in the distance; massive amounts of battery waste.

The EU, for example, wants to have 30 million electric cars by 2030 and while politicians can ignore the fossil fuel demands and strain on the grid, electric cars bring something they can't ignore; the environmental impact of giant toxic batteries in landfills.

Mathematics is a language and languages can be used to create stories. It just takes imagination to create time travel or wormholes or theories of strings or lots of nice things theoretical physicists throw into arXiv.

Sometimes math has to create a story because real numbers don't work, even if the physics does.

Wave-particle duality, a foundation of quantum mechanics, has a fascinating science history. James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations govern the device you are reading this article on, couldn't explain everything - he died of cancer at age 46. It was left to Albert Einstein a generation later, in his 1905 paper, to describe light as photons containing properties of both particles and electromagnetic fields - the waves of Maxwell.