The Many Lives of James Lovelock
eBook - ePub

The Many Lives of James Lovelock

Science, Secrets, Spycraft and Gaia Theory

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Many Lives of James Lovelock

Science, Secrets, Spycraft and Gaia Theory

About this book


“A revealing window into an extraordinary mind.”—Publishers Weekly

"Utterly fascinating—a beautifully braided account of the life of a maverick, prophetic genius."—Robert MacFarlane

Based on in-depth interviews with James Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal archive, The Many Lives of James Lovelock is a definitive, 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. But he also made many other profound discoveries, and led a life as exciting and unusual as any other major figure of the twentieth century.

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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Yes, you can access The Many Lives of James Lovelock by Jonathan Watts in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Technologie et ingénierie & Biographies de sciences et technologies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. James
  8. Nellie
  9. Thomas
  10. Helen
  11. Christine, Jane, Andrew, John
  12. Dian
  13. Victor
  14. Lynn
  15. Barry
  16. Sandra
  17. Nigel and Bruno
  18. Gaia
  19. Notes
  20. Bibliography
  21. Acknowledgements
  22. Index