Based on over eighty hours of interviews with Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive, Jonathan Watts has written a definitive and revelatory biography of a fascinating, sometimes contradictory man.
James Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory, the idea that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environments to maintain a habitable ecosystem.
Lovelock's life was a chronicle of twentieth-century science, and somehow he seemed to have a hand in much of it. During the Second World War he worked at the National Medical Research Institute, where his life-long interest in chemical tracing began. In the 1960s he worked at NASA. He worked for MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War. He was a science advisor to the oil giant Shell, who he warned as early as 1966 that fossil fuels were causing serious harm to the environment. He invented the technology that found the hole in the Ozone layer. And all of this shaped Gaia Theory - a theory that could not have been developed without the collaboration of two important women in his life.
Drawing together the many influences which shaped his life and thinking, The Many Lives of James Lovelock is a unique biography of one of the most fascinating scientists of the modern age.
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The Many Lives of James Lovelock 9781805302872 Hardback
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Watt's achievement, and Lovelock's: that of which we are part
Watts details a high open intelligence, where profound theoretical insights gave rise to a lifelong effort to ‘unpack’ them. This dynamic played out in the all too real world of a varied, problem-solving (practical) career, only partly independent. The reader’s satisfaction, narrative and intellectu…
Watts details a high open intelligence, where profound theoretical insights gave rise to a lifelong effort to ‘unpack’ them. This dynamic played out in the all too real world of a varied, problem-solving (practical) career, only partly independent. The reader’s satisfaction, narrative and intellectual, is to follow, decade by decade. That the detail of that career, and Lovelock’s pronouncements over time, must at least nuance any facile attempt to canonise him is perhaps less important in the end than the concept he concretised (properly understood) and the rather heroic human figure he offers us in this dark age. Much as scientific thinking never arrives at certainty, his own sense of his (huge) achievement seems always to have remained tentative. Quite correctly, Watts is careful to record Dian Hitchcock’s early and crucial role in articulating what was to become the ‘Gaia hypothesis.’ Here enters in the human tragedy of a love never properly acknowledged: American generosity, dutiful English reticence. Surely even now, more than one Hampstead keyboard tap-taps a screenplay into being, the sad, ‘brainy’ romance of Dian and Jim. From planet as partly-biological homeostat (self-regulating system, or system of systems) is a short step to planet as living entity. This was imagined at least twice in postwar science fiction: the “beast” imbuing Fred Hoyle’s eponymous ‘black cloud’ (1957), and – my particular fascination - the never-resolved nature of Stanisław Lem’s intelligent plasmic ‘ocean’-planet (Solaris, 1961). By the mid-1960s, Lovelock is coming to something like the same vision - “the great animal of planetary Life” (p105) – but from the other direction: the reality of our Earth. (To be clear, issues of influence are irrelevant; this is, rather, an overlapping of scientific imagining at a moment in the history of human ideas.)
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I really love it.
It's clearly an outstanding book, it covers so much territory, from his early childhood days right through to his teens. I only just started reading the first 3 chapters, can't wait to read the rest.
- Authors:
- Watts, Jonathan
- Format:
- Hardback
- ISBN:
- 9781805302872
- Publication Date:
- 12/09/2024
- Publisher:
- Canongate Books
- Year Published:
- 2024
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Number of Pages:
- 320
- Place of Publication:
- Edinburgh
- Language:
- English
- SKU:
- 9781805302872