[HN Gopher] A singular scientist: James Lovelock
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A singular scientist: James Lovelock
Author : Schroedingers2c
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-10-24 07:29 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| patkai wrote:
| 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!
| mabbo wrote:
| 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.
| zeristor wrote:
| 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.
| melling wrote:
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| No way it's 10%. Annual hurdle in the old age years is double
| digit percents.
| melling wrote:
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| All data I can find says expected lifespan is decreasing,
| not increasing.
| iisan7 wrote:
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| >> 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.
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