A singular scientist: James Lovelock | Hacker News Reader

A singular scientist: James Lovelock

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I've just finished his autobiography "Homage to Gaia". I've read dozens of scientists' biographies, but this stands out. Funny, unusual, very warm and humane with a lot of good thoughts about work, freelancing, science and history. Very recommended. My favorite story is when NASA asks him how to detect life on Mars and he answers "by an entropy reduction meter". The rest of the story is epic and very educational!

Tom Scott interviewed him last year in a really wonderful video about microwaves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y

> I found an article that said "The microwave was invented to heat hamsters humanely in 1950s experiments." And I thought, no it wasn't. ...was it?

At over 100 years old, the man was remarkably coherent and healthy. Quite sad to hear he's passed now.

I posted that video to HackerNews, it was very good but had a very low key title.

I probably have to watch it again since I can’t remember what it was about.

Born in 1919, he made it to 103. Lindbergh hadn’t yet flown across the Atlantic, people were watching silent movies, and only 35% of US homes had electricity.

https://gizmodo.com/how-the-1920s-thought-electricity-would-...

Many people born today (10%?) are going to make it to 2125. The world is going to change even more in the next 103 years than in the last 103.

No way it's 10%. Annual hurdle in the old age years is double digit percents.

It’s at least 10%. We cure many cancer(s), heart disease, Alzheimer’s, etc over the next 100 years.

There’s also likely a few discoveries on improving general health.

It's also the case that we already know what kinds of things kill people, and people aren't really sticking to the lifestyles that correspond to longer life.

Someone the Queen's age was actually unlikely to make it to 100, so you'd have to improve survival quite a bit.

From looking at a UK table I found, there's ~2000 people left of 100K at 99 years, 1300 left the year after. Table doesn't go to 103.

All data I can find says expected lifespan is decreasing, not increasing.

Some of the discrepancy is semantics. Global maximum lifespan is improving, but that's across societies taking the best survival rate at each age. Within many societies, net longevity gains have stalled.

Lovelock's an interesting character for sure. Although the "Gaia Hypothesis" ended up having a few fatal flaws, it stimulated a lot of thinking and discussion in the field of earth system sciences (atmospheric chemists were a lot more interested than old-school geologists and evolutionary biologists, certainly). Much of what Lovelock pointed to can also be viewed as simple chemical and physical buffering, for example the fact that the a pH-buffered chemical solution responds to the addition of acid in a manner that 'pushes back' against increasing acidity. Likewise, a planet with an ocean buffers temperature changes because the oceans can absorb and release heat in response to external forcing. Biological systems can do the same (forests buffer erosion, for example) but this isn't necessarily selected by evolution, it's just a feature of the biologicol-chemical-physical system. Ultimately, the success or failure of an individual species in a forest (due to natural selection) doesn't have much effect on the effects of a forest on the local climate, say.

All in all it was a bit of a spiritual-mystical 'Earth Mother Loves You' theme, which is nice but nature really isn't all that forgiving, as it's clear we can tip the climate system into a new mode, one which some forms of life will not have problems with, but which may drive quite a few others towards extinction.

Also, the article mentions his discovery of low levels of chlorinated and fluorinated organic compounds in the atmosphere with his improved detector, it fails to mention that Lovelock also stated at the time that they posed no environmental threat, due to their great stability. This isn't too surprising, as the chemistry that led to the release of the halogens into the stratosphere, where they destroyed the UV-protective stratospheric ozone layer, is fairly complex and unusual (ice crystal surfaces playing a big role over polar regions, radical reactions, etc.).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17778601/

Free Radicals Within the Antarctic Vortex: The Role of CFCs in Antarctic Ozone Loss (1991)

There's no doubt, however, that Lovelock made many people think about interconnections between apparently unrelated systems and that alone was a huge lifetime success story. Frank Herbert's Dune also introduced many similar concepts to a wider audience, although that in turn was preceded by Yale's G. Evelyn Hutchinson:

https://news.yale.edu/videos/yales-g-evelyn-hutchinson-and-i...

>> All in all it was a bit of a spiritual-mystical 'Earth Mother Loves You' theme

My exposure to the GAIA hypothesis was that the earth is a living system, not that earth mother loves me. It was an unusual combination of radical thinking and concise communication.

The problem with it is that it ignores that living creatures for the most part compete, not cooperate. Even the ones that do cooperate evolve successful "cheaters" that get the benefits of cooperation without the drawbacks. There is no "system" of the Earth but millions of competing systems. The fact that they've managed not not destroy the Earth's ecosystem (yet) is simply a coincidence. In fact, there's at least one example in the past of one that did cause such a catastrophe -- cyanobacteria, which produced the large amounts of free oxygen we have today in our atmosphere. Necessary to our (and most animals) existence, but deadly to most of the life on Earth at the time (which was anaerobic).

It's the character the article is really about. Much like the reverence we have for Feynman or Einstein, it's not just the science they did but the stylish way they did it. The author obviously has a great fondness.

But there's another message that's strong in there, and it comes from many sources around Lovelock. It's about how desperately we need more of Lovelock's breed, and how hostile to it our "prickly" science has become. The story of Nature rejecting him, not on the merit of his ideas, but his postal address, is simply embarrassing.

The article bewails the loss of visionaries, iconoclasts, intellectual courage, scepticism and independence. These are the traits we beat of children at school, and punish as trouble-making, deviance and disinformation in our now very rigid society, frightened of "alternatives".

Spike Milligan was right; Real progress is like an old car. It takes a crank to get things moving.

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