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He is ranked fourth in the "Top Ten Mad Scientists of the World".
(The three before him are Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Nikola Tesla.)
He lived in isolation, filling his barn with useless instruments, and became an independent scientist who was not attached to any university or business.
Most of his photos are smiling, but his remarks are strikingly pessimistic:
He believes that "sustainable development" is just a fantasy, and more importantly, "sustainable retreat".
He predicted that by 2100, 80 percent of the planet's population would die from climate change.
He believed that the earth was "alive" and likened it to a self-regulating organism, Gaia. And because of the destruction of the environment by humans, this organism is wiping out humans.
In 2020, he once again pessimistically predicted that "the last 1% of the Earth's biosphere and his own lifespan are left."
Two years later, he died on the day of his 103rd birthday.
He is the father of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock.
Lovelock's whimsical ideas are controversial in the scientific community, and there has never been a shortage of opposition, but it has gained great influence in unexpected places.
There are many extreme environmentalists who accept the Gaia hypothesis and call themselves Gaians.
Some of them have formed an eco-terrorist group called the Earth Liberation Front, which prevents large companies from profiting from environmentally damaging production through attacks.
Others play an influential role in the Greens across the West, pushing ahead with environmental issues in government and parliamentary activities.
But all this had little to do with Lovelock himself, who later angered a large number of environmentalists for his support for nuclear power.
He had been living in a small, remote fishing village in the south of England and had only returned to the public eye when he published books or given occasional interviews.
Lovelock was interviewed at the age of 100
According to his family, he was able to go out for a walk and give interviews until 6 months before his death.
But an accidental fall caused the old man's health to deteriorate rapidly, and he finally died in the company of his family on his 103rd birthday, July 26, 2022.
In his more than a hundred years of life, in addition to the Gaia hypothesis, he has made more contributions to science, and even missed the Nobel Prize in Chemistry because of a single thought.
Missed the Nobel Prize
Before the Gaia hypothesis was proposed, Lovelock was already a crazy inventor.
In the 1950s, to study the effects of extreme cold on body tissue, his job was to freeze hamsters at the National Institute of Medicine and find ways to revive them.
Lovelock bought a RAF-phased magnetron transmitter at his own expense, put the hamster in a box made of thin barbed wire, and heated it with a magnetron inside, resulting in almost all the frozen hamsters being resurrected!
The device was one of the earliest prototypes of a microwave oven, and before him, no one had ever heated a magnetron in a barbed wire box on a table.
Lovelock, 102, recalls the incident and simply laughs and says:
I baked a potato with it and it worked well.
Around the same time, Lovelock also invented the "electron capture detector" to help measure the spread of toxic man-made compounds in the environment.
It was with this detection device that he became the first person in the scientific community to discover that the atmosphere was full of leaking Freon.
Unfortunately, he did not take it seriously at the time, thinking that Freon was harmless, and made this point in a lecture in 1972.
The other two American scientists, Loland and Maureena, were very interested in his lectures and began to devote themselves to research, and eventually the two discovered that the release of Freon would damage the ozone layer, and in 1995 they jointly won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
It can be said that it is very yin and yang wrong.
Not only that, but Lovelock's way of behaving and behaving in the world has always been somewhat secondary.
Dr Roger Highfield, director of the Science Museum in London, described Lovelock's character this way:
He was a non-conformist man who was more than happy to provoke some people, whether it was to express his dislike of common sense, formal education and the committee, or to express his enthusiastic support for nuclear energy.
Since 1964, he has presented himself as an independent scientist. Unlike other scientists, he neither teaches at universities (only as a visiting professor in cybernetics at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom), is not affiliated with any research institutes, and has no students.
More than 40 patents, more than 200 scientific papers, many popular books that extend the Gaia hypothesis... These achievements were achieved by him as an independent scientist, which can be said to be very rare in academic circles.
In his 2000 autobiography, Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist, he mentioned that scientific research requires an independent line.
Because, as he likes to tell people, the best science comes from unconstrained minds—he hates being directed.
He also believed that true scientists, like creative artists, should regard scientific work as their only way of life, without any other demands.
His rich imagination and maverick way of doing things are also reflected in the birth and development of the Gaia hypothesis.
Get inspired by Mars
At the time of the Gaia hypothesis, the Englishman Lovelock was working for NASA, designing the scientific instruments needed to detect life on Mars.
He was disappointed with other biologists working at NASA, criticizing them for not understanding where to start.
Because it demoralized the team, it also clashed with NASA's leadership. The leader gave him two days to come up with an actual solution, or he would be fired.
Lying in bed that night, he had the idea that gases produced by life activities, such as oxygen and methane, would throw the Martian atmosphere out of balance.
He began to realize that chemical equilibrium was equivalent to death, and that any form of chemical imbalance could be seen as a signal of life, and based on this he made a prototype of a detection device.
How sophisticated will a device that can go to Mars be? In fact, he used the food in his kitchen to seal the cans.
After the gas is heated, different chemical components move along the pipe at different speeds, and then can be connected to a meteorological mass spectrometer for analysis.
In 1976, the Vikings 1 and 2 probes landed on Mars with their improved, weight-loss experimental devices.
Eventually, the instrument found no signs of life on Mars, not even any organic matter, and Lovelock left NASA to continue as his independent scientist.
But the Gaia hypothesis took shape in his exploration of Mars.
Lovelock first believed that biological activity led to the stabilization of the Earth's surface temperature and chemical composition to support the continued existence of organisms.
Later, he expanded his theory in other directions, such as explaining why marine life produces about the same amount of sulfur and iodine.
Later, the famous microbiologist Lynn Margulis joined his work, supplementing how microbes affect the atmosphere and the Earth's surface.
As an independent scientist, his paper publishing process was not smooth, and he was once rejected by Nature directly on the grounds that "we do not accept papers from home addresses, most of which come from geeks."
As a last resort, he went to a friend's work as a part-time visiting professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.
After the Gaia hypothesis was published, in the face of a lot of doubts, Lovelock also used a computer simulation of a daisy world to test his idea.
In the simulated world, only two organisms exist, white daisy and black daisy, of which white daisy reflects sunlight and black daisy absorbs sunlight.
In his demonstration, adjusting the intensity of solar radiation would not cause the world to collapse, and the two daisies would adjust their respective numbers to maintain a stable temperature and stay within a suitable range for survival.
This result was not recognized by others in academia, who initially criticized the experiment as requiring a "secret consensus" between the two organisms to be feasible, but was refuted by Lovelot with theory.
Later criticism focused on this simulated world being too monolithic to reflect important details of the real Earth system.
Lovelot also fought back, gradually adding herbivores, carnivores, etc. to the simulated world, constantly improving the ecosystem.
The results show that the greater the number of species, the greater the ability and stability of the entire planet to self-regulate.
From this confrontation, the Gaia hypothesis has unexpectedly become an explanation for biodiversity and ecological stability.
Considering only organisms and the environment outside of humans, the Gaia hypothesis holds that the Earth is capable of sustaining the living environment needed for life.
But as humanity's environmental damage intensified, the same theory made Lovelock even more pessimistic about the future.
Pessimistic future forecasts
Over the past decade, Lovelock has made various pessimistic predictions about the fate of the planet.
In his 2009 book, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back, he noted that for the planet's more than 6 billion people, "sustainable development" is just an illusion, and it should be mentioned that "sustainable regression" should be mentioned.
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 rainforest crises, but no one talks about putting these into the whole environment of one Planet. If you do, you will find that these small concerns can constitute a terrible crisis.
He also made a surprising statement in 2008: by 2100, 80% of human beings will die.
Enjoy your life, which, if you're lucky enough, will last 20 years, and after that, it's all going to be unthinkable.
This claim caused widespread controversy at the time, and was the reason why he was named one of the top ten mad scientists by the American Life Science Network.
But later, after further research, he revised this view himself.
Until last year, he predicted in his new book, Novacene:
Our supremacy as the primary understanders of the universe is coming to an end quickly, and the future understanders will not be humans, but people I have chosen to call "cyborgs" who will design and build themselves.
He describes Cyborg as the self-sufficient, self-aware offspring of today's robots and AI systems, and just as humans replaced our ancestral species, Cyborg will also replace humans.
His crazy scientific views have also inspired many novels, TV series, and movies.
For example, the Gaia hypothesis influenced Asimov's famous science fiction novel Al Qaeda, and the planet Pandora in the science fiction film Avatar.
The shadow of Lovelock's theory can be seen even in the third episode of the recent Love Death Machine season three, "The Pulse of the Machine".
For his sudden death, some netizens regretted that as I grew up, I realized that James Lovelock was the real giant of this era.
But as he told The New Scientist in an interview:
I am relieved to think that I am part of Gaia and that my destiny is to merge with our living planet.
Reference Links:
[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/
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