All power to the nonconformists of the world

Ameme circulates regularly on Twitter where someone asks you to list public figures, living or dead, you’d like to invite to a dinner party. Two names have always been on my list, the sci-fi writer Arthur C Clarke and the British scientist James Lovelock, who died on July 27, aged 103. These two great thinkers shared an independence of spirit and approach to science that has added immeasurably to the sum of human knowledge. Both had a very good grasp on scientific theory but, crucially, were also obsessed with the application of science to real world problems. Clarke was the first to see the potential for geostationary satellites to form a global telecommunications network.

Lovelock, a chemist, was a bona fide inventor to whom we owe a particular debt of gratitude, located where we are on the planet. In the 1950s he developed a device he called the Electron Capture Detector (ECD). It was capable of detecting tiny traces of man-made chemicals in the Earth’s atmosphere. He was able to use it to show that traces of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), commonly used in the middle of the 20th century as refrigerants, were present in the stratosphere. Other scientists used his instruments to explore how CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, creating the ‘‘ozone hole’’ over Antarctica that exposed us to elevated doses of ultraviolet radiation.

The work led to the banning of CFCs and the ozone layer has been gradually recovering ever since. The royalties from that invention gave Lovelock the means to do his own thing and he has been an ‘‘independent scientist since 1964’’. He wasn’t beholden to any university department, though he published in the major scientific journals and did a stint working at Nasa looking at the potential for extraterrestrial life on Mars and elsewhere in the universe.

Sadly, scientists forging their own path are too often written off as cranks or eccentrics. The Gaia hypothesis, which Lovelock is most famous for, was initially panned or ignored by the academic establishment. It proposed that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a complex, self-regulating system constantly in search of equilibrium. The idea has since had a major influence on how scientists study the world.

‘‘Lovelock showed us that Darwin had it only half right,’’ the geoscientist Lee Kump said of the Gaia theory. ‘‘Life evolves in response to environmental change, but the environment also evolves in response to biological change.’’ All power then to the Lovelocks of this world, the non-conformists who break new ground and benefit all of humanity in the process.

Lovelock showed us that Darwin had it only half right.