He is ranked fourth within the “Top 10 Mad Scientists in the World”.
(The three forward of him are Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Nikola Tesla)
He lived in isolation, filling his barn with unusable devices, and have become an impartial scientist not hooked up to any college or enterprise.
Most of his pictures are smiling, however his remarks are surprisingly pessimistic:
He believes that “sustainable development” is simply an phantasm, and extra ought to be talked about as “sustainable retreat”.
He predicted that by 2100, 80% of the earth’s inhabitants will probably be killed by local weather change.
He believes that the earth is “alive”, evaluating it to a self-regulating organism known as “Gaia”. And due to the destruction of the setting by people, this organism is destroying people.
In 2020, he once more pessimistically predicted that “the earth’s biosphere and its own lifespan will have the last 1% left”.
Two years later, he died on his 103rd birthday.
He is the daddy of the Gaia speculation – James Lovelock.
Lovelock’s wild concepts are stuffed with controversy within the scientific neighborhood, and there’s by no means a scarcity of large-scale opposition, nevertheless it has gained huge affect in sudden locations.
There are fairly a number of excessive environmentalists who’ve accepted the Gaia speculation, calling themselves Gaians.
Some of them shaped an eco-terrorist group known as the Earth Liberation Front, which used assaults to stop massive firms from taking advantage of environmentally damaging manufacturing.
Still others are influential within the Green Party, which is unfold throughout the West, advancing environmental points in authorities and parliamentary occasions.
But none of this had a lot to do with Lovelock himself, who later angered a slew of environmentalists for his assist for nuclear energy.
He has all the time lived in a small, distant fishing village within the south of England, solely to return to the general public eye when he publishes books or provides occasional interviews.
△ Lovelock was interviewed on the age of 100
According to his household, he was capable of exit for walks and provides interviews till six months earlier than his loss of life.
But an unintended fall made the previous man’s well being deteriorate quickly, and he lastly handed away within the firm of his household on his 103rd birthday, July 26, 2022.
In his greater than 100 years of life, along with the Gaia speculation, he has made extra contributions to science, and even missed the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for one thought.
Missing the Nobel Prize
Lovelock was a loopy inventor lengthy earlier than the Gaia speculation was proposed.
In the Nineteen Fifties, to check the consequences of utmost chilly on physique tissue, his job was to freeze hamsters on the National Institute of Medicine and discover methods to revive them.
Lovelock purchased a magnetron transmitter out of the RAF at his personal expense, put the hamster in a field made from nice wire mesh, heated it with a magnetron, and virtually the entire frozen hamsters got here again to life. !
This machine is likely one of the earliest prototypes of microwave ovens. Before him, nobody had put a magnetron right into a wire mesh field on a tabletop to warmth it.
Lovelock, 102, recalled the incident, solely to chortle and say:
I baked a potato with it and it labored nice.
Around the identical time, Lovelock additionally invented “electron capture detectors” to assist measure the unfold of poisonous man-made compounds within the setting.
It was with this detection machine that he turned the primary individual within the scientific neighborhood to find that the ambiance was stuffed with leaking Freon.
Unfortunately, he didn’t take it critically on the time, considering that Freon was innocent, and made this level in a lecture in 1972.
The different two American scientists, Lorland and Molina, have been very on this after listening to his lecture and started to spend money on analysis. Finally, the 2 found that the discharge of Freon would harm the ozone layer, and so they joined arms in 1995. Gone the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
It could be stated that it is extremely fallacious.
Not solely that, however Lovelock’s habits and lifestyle have all the time been considerably secondary.
Dr. Roger Highfield, director of the Science Museum in London, described Lovelock’s character this fashion:
He’s a nonconformist, and he is very happy to impress some individuals, whether or not it is expressing his distaste for frequent sense, formal training and committees, or his enthusiastic assist for nuclear vitality.
Since 1964, he has offered himself as an impartial scientist. Unlike different scientists, he doesn’t train on the college (solely as a visiting professor of cybernetics on the University of Reading, UK), isn’t affiliated with any analysis establishment, and has no college students.
More than 40 patents, greater than 200 scientific papers, many well-liked books that broaden Gaia’s speculation… These achievements are all achieved by him as an impartial scientist, which could be stated to be very uncommon in academia.
In his 2000 autobiography, Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist, he talked about that scientific analysis requires an impartial method.
Because, as he likes to inform individuals, the perfect science comes from unfettered minds — he hates being directed.
He additionally believed that an actual scientist ought to be like a artistic artist, taking scientific work as his solely lifestyle, with no different necessities.
His wealthy creativeness and distinctive method of doing issues are additionally mirrored within the delivery and growth of the Gaia speculation.
Get impressed by Mars
When the Gaia speculation was proposed, Lovelock, an Englishman, was working for NASA, designing the scientific devices wanted to detect life on Mars.
He was dissatisfied by different biologists working at NASA, criticizing them for not understanding the place to start out.
There was additionally battle with NASA management for demoralizing the crew. The chief gave him two days to provide you with a sensible answer, or he was fired.
As he lay in mattress that night time, he had an thought: The gases produced by the processes of life, resembling oxygen and methane, would throw the Martian ambiance out of steadiness.
He started to appreciate that chemical equilibrium is equal to loss of life, and that any type of chemical imbalance could be considered a sign of life, and primarily based on this, he made a prototype of a detection machine.
How subtle would a tool to go to Mars must be? In truth, he used the meals in his kitchen to make it in sealed jars.
After the gasoline is heated, totally different chemical elements transfer alongside the pipe at totally different speeds, which might then be linked to a climate mass spectrometer for evaluation.
In 1976, the Viking 1 and a pair of probes successively landed on Mars together with his improved and weight-reduced experimental units.
Ultimately, the instrument discovered no indicators of life on Mars, and even any natural matter, and Lovelock left NASA to proceed as his impartial scientist.
But the Gaia speculation progressively took form throughout his exploration of Mars.
Lovelock first believed that organic exercise led to the stabilization of the earth’s floor temperature and chemical composition to assist the continued existence of life.
Later, he expanded the idea into different instructions, resembling explaining why marine organisms produce roughly the identical quantity of sulfur and iodine.
Still later, famend microbiologist Lynn Margulis joined his work, including to how microbes have an effect on the ambiance and Earth’s floor.
As an impartial scientist, his paper publishing course of was not easy. He was as soon as rejected by Nature instantly, on the grounds that “we do not accept papers submitted from home addresses, and most of these papers are from eccentric people”.
As a final resort, he turned a part-time visiting professor on the University of Reading, the place a good friend labored.
After the Gaia speculation was revealed, within the face of plenty of doubts, Lovelock additionally used a pc to simulate a daisy world to confirm his thought.
There are solely two sorts of creatures within the simulated world, white daisies and black daisies, the place white daisies mirror daylight and black daisies soak up daylight.
In his demonstration, adjusting the depth of photo voltaic radiation wouldn’t crash the world, and the 2 species of daisies would regulate their numbers to maintain the temperature secure and inside an appropriate vary for survival.
This consequence was not acknowledged by the remainder of the tutorial neighborhood, who initially criticized the experiment as requiring a “secret consensus” between the 2 organisms to be possible, however was refuted by Lovelot with the idea.
Later criticism centered on the truth that the simulated world was too monolithic and didn’t mirror vital particulars of the actual Earth system.
Lovelot additionally fought again, progressively including herbivores, carnivores, and so on. to the simulated world to repeatedly enhance the ecosystem.
The outcomes confirmed that the larger the variety of species, the larger the power and stability of your complete planet to self-regulate.
From this confrontation, the Gaia speculation has unexpectedly change into a proof for biodiversity and ecological stability.
Considering solely creatures and environments aside from people, the Gaia speculation holds that the earth is able to sustaining the residing setting required for all times.
But as human harm to the setting intensifies, the identical set of theories makes Lovelock much more pessimistic in regards to the future.
gloomy future forecast
Over the previous dozen years, Lovelock has made varied pessimistic predictions in regards to the destiny of the planet.
In his 2009 ebook, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back, he famous that for the greater than 6 billion individuals on Earth, ” “Sustainable growth” is just an illusion, and what should be mentioned is “sustainable retreat”.
I listened to them talk about Earth as if it were another planet that had nothing to do with us. Some of them talk about melting glaciers, some talk about the rainforest crisis, but no one talks about that in the context of a planet as a whole. If you do, you’ll find that these little worries can make up a big, terrifying crisis.
He also said in 2008 that 80% of the human race will be dead by 2100.
Enjoy your life, if you’re lucky, it will last another 20 years, and after that, it’s hard to imagine.
This claim was widely disputed at the time, and is the reason why he was ranked fourth among the top ten mad scientists by LiveScience.com.
However, he later revised this view himself after further research.
Until last year, he predicted in his new book “Novacene”:
Our supremacy as master understanders of the universe is rapidly coming to an end, and the future understanders will not be humans but what I choose to call “cyborgs” who will design and build themselves.
He describes cyborgs as self-sufficient, self-aware descendants of today’s robotics and AI systems, and just as humans replaced our ancestral species, cyborgs will replace humans.
His crazy scientific ideas have also inspired many novels, TV series and movies.
For example, the Gaia hypothesis has influenced Asimov’s famous science fiction novel “Base” and the planet Pandora in the science fiction movie “Avatar”.
It wasn’t until recently that Lovelock’s theory could be seen in the third episode of Love Dead Season 3, “The Pulse of the Machine.”
Regarding his sudden passing, some netizens expressed regret: As I grew up, I realized that James Lovelock is the real giant of this era.
But as he told New Scientist in an interview:
It is comforting to think that I am a part of Gaia and that my purpose is to merge with our living planet.
Reference link:
[1]https://twitter.com/jonathanwatts/status/1552287829870485505
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32250694
[3]https://www.livescience.com/11380-top-10-mad-scientists.html
[4]https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/james-lovelocks-greatest-epiphany-quest-for-life-on-mars/
[5]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1365902/?
[6]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y
[7]https://theconversation.com/james-lovelock-the-scientist-inventor-who-transformed-our-view-of-life-on-earth-187870
[8]https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332401-000-james-lovelock-at-100-the-creator-of-gaia-theory-on-humanitys-future/
Source: www.ithome.com
