The world's fourth craziest scientist died on his 103rd birthday

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He ranks fourth among the "Top Ten Mad Scientists in the World".

(The three before him are Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Nikola Tesla)

He lived in seclusion, filled his barn with instruments of unknown purpose, and became an independent scientist not affiliated with any university or company.

Most of his photos show him smiling, but his comments are surprisingly pessimistic:

He believes that "sustainable development" is just an illusion, and what should be mentioned is "sustainable retreat".

He predicts that by 2100, 80% of the world's population will die due to climate change.

He believed that the earth was "alive" and compared it to a self-regulating organism called "Gaia". However, due to human destruction of the environment, this organism was destroying humans.

In 2020, he again made a pessimistic prediction that "the Earth's biosphere and our own lifespan only have the last 1% left."

Two years later, he died on his 103rd birthday.

He is the father of the Gaia hypothesis - James Lovelock .

Lovelock's wild ideas were controversial in the scientific community and were met with a lot of opposition, but they also gained a huge influence in unexpected places.

Many extreme environmentalists accept the Gaia hypothesis and call themselves Gaians .

Some of them have formed an eco-terrorist group called the Earth Liberation Front, which attacks to prevent large companies from making profits from environmentally destructive production.

Others wield influence in Green Parties across the West, promoting environmental issues in government and parliamentary action.

But all this had little to do with Lovelock himself, who later angered a large number of environmentalists with his support for nuclear power.

He has been living in a remote fishing village in southern England, and only returned to the public eye when publishing books or occasionally giving interviews.

△ Lovelock was interviewed when he was 100 years old

According to his family, he was still able to go out for walks and give interviews until six months before his death.

But an accidental fall caused the old man's health to deteriorate rapidly, and he eventually passed away on his 103rd birthday, July 26, 2022, surrounded by his family.

During his life of more than a hundred years, he made many more contributions to science besides the Gaia hypothesis, and even missed the Nobel Prize in Chemistry due to a momentary difference.

Missed Nobel Prize

Before he proposed the Gaia hypothesis, Lovelock was already a mad inventor.

In the 1950s, his job at the National Institute of Medicine was to freeze hamsters and then find a way to revive them in order to study the effects of extreme cold on body tissues.

Lovelock used his own money to buy a magnetron transmitter that was discarded by the Royal Air Force. He put the hamsters in a box made of fine wire mesh and used the magnetron to heat them inside. As a result, almost all the frozen hamsters came back to life!

This device was one of the earliest prototypes of the microwave oven. Before him, no one had ever put a magnetron in a wire mesh box on a table to heat it.

Lovelock, 102, just smiled and said when he recalled the incident:

I baked a potato with it and it worked great.

At about 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 leaked Freon.

Unfortunately, he did not take it seriously at the time, thinking that Freon was harmless, and put forward this view in a lecture in 1972.

Two other American scientists, Roland and Molina, became very interested in this after listening to his lecture and began to conduct research. Eventually, they discovered that the release of CFCs would damage the ozone layer and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together in 1995.

It can be said that it was a complete mistake.

Not only that, Lovelock's behavior and way of dealing with people have always been a bit immature.

Dr Roger Highfield, Director of the Science Museum in London, described Lovelock's character:

He was a nonconformist who took great pleasure in riling up some people, whether expressing his dislike for common sense, formal education, and committees or his enthusiastic support for nuclear power.

He has been an independent scientist since 1964. Unlike other scientists, he neither teaches at a university (he has only been a visiting professor at the Department of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in the UK) , is not affiliated with any research institution, and has no students.

More than 40 patents, more than 200 scientific papers, many popular books expanding the Gaia hypothesis... These achievements were all made by him as an independent scientist, which is very rare in the academic circle.

In his 2000 autobiography, Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist, he mentioned that scientific research requires an independent approach.

Because as he liked to tell people, the best science came from unfettered minds—and he hated being bossed around.

He also believed that a true scientist should, like a creative artist, regard scientific work as his only way of life without any other requirements.

His rich imagination and unique way of doing things are also reflected in the birth and development of the Gaia hypothesis.

Get inspired by Mars

When the Gaia hypothesis was proposed, British scientist Lovelock was working for NASA, designing scientific instruments needed to detect life on Mars .

He was frustrated with other biologists working at NASA, criticizing them for not understanding where to start looking.

Because he demoralized the team, he also had a conflict with NASA's leadership, who gave him two days to come up with a practical solution or he would be fired.

That night, as he lay in bed, he had an idea: gases produced by life activities (such as oxygen and methane) would cause the Martian atmosphere to lose balance.

He began to realize that chemical balance was equivalent to death, and any form of chemical imbalance could be regarded as a sign of life , and based on this he built a prototype of a detection device.

How sophisticated would a device that could go to Mars have to be? He actually put it together using food cans from his kitchen.

When the gas is heated, different chemical components will move along the pipe at different speeds and can then be connected to a meteorological mass spectrometer for analysis.

In 1976, the Viking 1 and 2 probes landed on Mars, carrying his improved and lightened experimental devices.

Ultimately, the instrument found no signs of life on Mars, not even any organic matter, and Lovelock left NASA to continue his work as an independent scientist.

However, the Gaia hypothesis gradually took shape during his experience exploring Mars.

Lovelock was the first to argue that biological activity resulted in a stabilization of the Earth's surface temperature and chemical composition to support the continued existence of life.

He later expanded the theory to explain, for example, why marine organisms produce roughly equal amounts of sulfur and iodine.

Later, the famous microbiologist Lynn Margulis joined him in his work, adding insights into how microbes affect the atmosphere and Earth's surface.

As an independent scientist, his paper publishing process was not smooth. Once, his paper was rejected directly by Nature with the reason that "we do not accept papers submitted with home addresses, most of these papers come from weirdos."

As a last resort, he took a part-time job as a visiting professor at the University of Reading in the UK where a friend worked.

After the Gaia hypothesis was published, facing a lot of doubts, Lovelock used a computer to simulate a daisy world to verify his idea.

In the simulated world, there are only two kinds of creatures: white daisies and black daisies. White daisies reflect sunlight, while black daisies absorb it.

In his demonstration, adjusting the intensity of solar radiation will not cause the world to collapse. The two types of daisies will adjust their respective numbers to maintain a stable temperature and remain within a range suitable for survival.

This result was not recognized by others in the academic community. They initially criticized the experiment for requiring a "secret consensus" between the two organisms to be feasible, but Lovelot refuted it with theory.

Criticism later focused on the fact that this simulated world was too monolithic and did not reflect important details of the real Earth system.

Lovelot also fought back by gradually adding herbivores, carnivores, etc. into the simulated world, constantly improving the ecosystem.

The results show that the greater the number of species, the greater the self-regulating ability and stability of the entire planet.

From this confrontation, the Gaia hypothesis unexpectedly became an explanation for biodiversity and ecological stability.

If only non-human organisms and environments are considered, the Gaia hypothesis holds that the Earth has the ability to sustain the living environment required for life.

But as human damage to the environment intensifies, the same theory makes Lovelock even more pessimistic about the future.

Pessimistic future predictions

Over the past decade or so, Lovelock has made various pessimistic predictions about the fate of the Earth.

In his 2009 book, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back, he mentioned that for the more than 6 billion people on Earth, "sustainable development" is just a fantasy, and what should be mentioned is "sustainable retreat."

I listened to them talking about the Earth as if it were another planet that had nothing to do with us. Some of them were talking about melting glaciers, others about the tropical rainforest crisis, but no one was talking about it in the context of the Earth as a whole. If you do that, you'll see that these small concerns add up to a big, scary crisis.

He also made a shocking statement in 2008: 80% of humanity will be dead by 2100.

Enjoy your life, if you are lucky it will last 20 years, after that it will be too late.

This statement caused widespread controversy at the time, and was also the reason why he was named fourth among the top ten crazy scientists by the American Life Science Network.

However, after further research, he revised this view.

Until last year, he predicted in his new book Novacene:

Our supremacy as the primary understanders of the universe is rapidly coming to an end, and the understanders of the future will not be humans, but what I choose to call "cyborgs", who will design and build themselves.

He describes cyborgs as the self-sufficient, self-aware descendants of today’s robotic and artificial intelligence systems, and that just as humans replaced our ancestral species, so too will cyborgs replace humans.

His crazy scientific ideas have also inspired many novels, TV series and movies.

For example, the Gaia hypothesis influenced Asimov's famous science fiction novel "Foundation" and the planet Pandora in the science fiction movie "Avatar".

The shadow of Lovelock's theory can be seen in the third episode of the third season of Love, Death and Robots, "Pulse of the Machine".

Regarding his sudden death, some netizens expressed regret: As I grew up, I realized that James Lovelock was the true giant of this era.

But as he told New Scientist in an interview:

I feel comforted by the thought that I am part of Gaia and that my destiny is to merge with this living planet of ours.

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/