11 September

James Lovelock has turned 100. A scientist and inventor, here he is with one of his early devices, a gas chromatograph. Some now call his work (together with Lynn Margulis, now sadly gone) the greatest shift in human understanding since Galileo. What they did is amazing, to me anyway. They replaced the idea of 'objects' that obey laws in science (Galileo's idea) with the idea that all things have agency, whether we would call them alive or dead. They behave in unpredictable ways, and are connected to each other. With Galileo (and all knowledge after him), those connections didn't exist, and scientific laws did all the connecting, as well as animating the objects - providing the reason they behaved they way they do. Lovelock and Margulis' ideas would say - those laws, aren't they just fiddles you need to introduce when you strip the agency and connections out of things themselves? How are they any different to a God directing traffic?