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THE AGES OF GAIA: A BIOGRAPHY OF OUR LIVING EARTH |
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Foreword Most working scientists have an awareness and respect for the history of the fields in which they labor, but what they generally have in mind is a series of endeavors strung through the volumes of their specialized journals that are still held in the library stacks -- not at all the much longer stretch of time and work that professional scholars would require for a proper history of science. It is not that researchers have short memories, but that they learn and retain only the events that set their fields atremble in the first place. And for most of science these days, perhaps all of it, the great changes that launched this century's vast transformation of human knowledge began within this century, or at least seemed to. The modern postdoctoral student in a laboratory engaged in molecular biology, for instance, feels no dependence on generations of forebears more than 20 years back. The contemporary physicists may track their ideas back almost a century, to the beginnings of quantum theory, but it is the concepts emerging in only the past decade that are regarded as the real history. The cosmologists are out on totally new ground, looking in amazement at strange, unanticipated kinds of space and time, making educated guesses at phenomena far beyond the suburban solar system or the local galaxy, even speculating about universes bubbling out at the boundaries of this one. We are, quite literally, in a new world, a much more peculiar place than it seemed a few centuries back, harder to make sense of, riskier to speculate about, and alive with information which is becoming more accessible and bewildering at the same time. It sometimes seems that there is not just more to be learned, there is everything to be learned. This is far from the general public view of the matter, as reflected in the science sections of newspapers and newsmagazines. The nonscientific layman tends to take technology to be so closely linked to science as to be the center of the enterprise. The progress of science and that of technology seem to be all of a piece -- machines, electronics, computer chips, Mars landings, nonbiodegradable plastics, the ozone hole, the bomb, all the rest of what now looks like twentieth-century culture. What is not so clearly seen is the newness of the scientific information itself, the strangeness, and, where meaning is to be discerned, the meaning. There is a great difference between the intellectual product of modern science and the various technologies that are sometimes (nothing like as frequently as the public might guess) derived from that product. The books in this series, sponsored by The Commonwealth Fund, represent an attempt to clarify this distinction, as well as to provide a closer look at what goes on in the minds of scientists as they go about their work.
This book by James Lovelock describes a set of observations about the life of our planet which may, one day, be recognized as one of the major discontinuities in human thought. If Lovelock turns out to be as right in his view of things as I believe he is, we will be viewing the Earth as a coherent system of life, self-regulating, self-changing, a sort of immense organism. This is not likely, in my opinion, to lead directly or indirectly to any specific piece of new technology to be put to use, although it may very well begin to influence, in new and gentler ways, the other sorts of technology we might be selecting for use in the future. The selection of this book, and of others in The Commonwealth Fund Book Program, has been the responsibility of an Advisory Committee consisting of: Alexander G. Beam, M.D.; Donald S. Fredrickson, M.D.; Lynn Margulis, Ph.D.; Maclyn McCarty, M.D.; Lady Jean Medawar; Berton Roueche; Frederick Seitz, Ph.D.; and Otto Westphal, M.D. The publisher is represented by Edwin Barber, senior vice president, W. W. Norton & Company. Antonina W. Bouis serves as managing editor of the series, and Stephanie Hemmert as secretary. Margaret Mahoney, president of The Commonwealth Fund, has actively supported the work of the Advisory Committee at every turn. Lewis Thomas, M.D., Editor, The Commonwealth Fund Book Program
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