EclecticLip

This article in the Times is about James Lovelock.  Like many articles about the author of the Gaia hypothesis — which posits that the earth and life on it form a self-equilibriating system — it notes his pessimism for the future of humanity.  Heck, that’s evident even in the article’s title:

“It’s too late for planet earth, says James Lovelock.”

The article also notes Lovelock’s derision for renewable energy — he prefers nuclear (despite its myriad challenges including cost, lead time, uranium depletion, and that whole management-of-waste thing — tho thorium reactors might hold promise… many years from now).  Indeed, Lovelock evidently thinks renewable energy is an elaborate scam made possible by subsidies!  This neatly parallels my thoughts on nuclear energy. 

In this, Lovelock reminds me of Einstein.  As we all know, Einstein also contributed epochal insights to the scientific community.  Few realize though, that Albert was on the wrong side of the debate about quantum mechanics: he spent his later years in a futile attempt to disprove it.  As innumerable experiments have shown, Einstein was wrong.

This is in fact the subject of Einstein’s famously mangled quote “God does not play dice with the universe”, which started off as “I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice“.

Einstein could not accept the premise that at the microscopic, quantum level, reality exists as a field of probabilities, until interactions collapse all possible outcomes into one.  (See Schrodinger’s cat for a PETA-unfriendly example.)

It seems to me Lovelock is in the same position - he made a titanic contribution to science.  But as with Einstein, he’s been unable to keep up with the latest developments, and so is making an inferior argument (that is, nuclear over renewables).  As one of the article’s interviewees notes, Lovelock is:

“very knowledgeable about how Earth systems work, and he is right about the need to integrate science. But he does not apply the same intellectual rigour to his judgments about energy”