Homage to Gaia Read Online Free PDF Page A

full-time job. Building , testing and selling a well-made product is a right and proper way of life. It provides employment, brings wealth to our country, and is a source of pride, but it was not what I wanted. How could I devote my time to science if I was concerned about the future and the welfare of my employees and my company?
    As a scientist, I have been an explorer looking for new worlds, not a harvester from safe and productive fields, and life at the frontier has shown me that there are no certainties and that dogma is usually wrong. I now recognize that with each discovery the extent of the unknown grows larger, not smaller. The discoveries I have made came mostly from doubting conventional wisdom, and I would advise any young scientist looking for a new and fresh topic to research to seek the flaw in anything claimed by the orthodox to be certain. There are several examples of the use of this approach in this book. The most important was to challenge the biological dogma that organisms simply adapt to their environment. It turned out that just as we cannot observe an atom without changing its state, so neither can we, or any living thing, evolve without changing the state of the Earth. This is the essence of Gaia.
    I hope that I can convince you that the independent scientist has a wonderfully interesting and rewarding life—every bit as good as that of the artist or composer, and may even be as worthwhile. I doubt ifthe discovery of CFCs in the atmosphere, or the extraordinary link between the microscopic algae of the oceans and the clouds above them and, most of all, the idea that the Earth regulates its climate and composition—the Gaia theory—would have come as quickly had I stayed in employment or become an entrepreneur. Gaia has been my inspiration since it first came into my mind in September 1965. Theories in science are valued by the success of investigations and experiments they inspire; by this measure, Gaia has been fruitful. Thousands of scientists owe their employment and their grant funds to my work as an independent scientist and I include among them those who spend their time trying to disprove Gaia theory.
    The four chapters that follow are about my childhood and my experiences as an apprentice practitioner of science. Then, in Chapters 5 and 6 I explain how I became an independent scientist, how I do it, and about the customers who provide support. In Chapters 7 to 9 I try to show how serious science can be done from a home laboratory and paid for from the profits of the practice. Chapter 9 is about the quest for Gaia from its start in the 1960s until the writing of this book. In Chapter 10 I explain the practical details of a life spent as an independent scientist. My more recent personal history follows in Chapters 11 and 12, and in the Epilogue, I offer Gaia as a way of life for agnostics.
    Let me start by telling you about my childhood and the events that shaped my evolution as an independent scientist.

1

Childhood
    The March family, that is to say, my mother’s relatives, grew up in east London, north of the Thames. My grandmother was a Chatterton and, according to the family, she was a descendant of the notable Victorian, Daniel Chatterton; how true is this claim I do not know, only that a photograph of him was in the family collection, now sadly gone. I loved my grandmother dearly and she was, for all emotional and practical purposes, the mother figure of my childhood. My true mother was as confused by women’s issues and their struggle for recognition as are many women today. I think that I was an unwanted child, an accident of the celebration of armistice night on 11 November , 1918. My mother then had a responsible and fulfilling job as personal secretary to what we would now call the CEO of Middlesex County Council. It stretched her very capable mind and gave her status far beyond the working-class expectations of her childhood. She had a powerful intellect, but with little