4 July

Bruno Latour was one of my mentors, and also one of the examiners of my PhD, years ago now. He’s internationally renowned for his brilliant and breathtaking recasting of science and technology, but also religion and many other fields. Here he talks about a day he had with Jim Lovelock, now 98, the founder of the Gaia hypothesis, and he talks about the ways this crucial idea has been misunderstood. Also mention of Lynn Margulis, I think one of the greatest scientists of our generation, now sadly gone. Lovelock in a way is the next Galileo, and most fundamentally what he and Margulis did was replace objects in science (Galileo’s invention) with agents. Agency, the way all parts of our Earth act to create the world we know.