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Lovelock's DaisyWorld & the Gaia Hypothesis

My logo is a DaisyWorld daisy.

DaisyWorld was invented by James Lovelock, to explain how the Gaia Hypothesis did not require a sentient Earth, but only feedback loops, for homeostasis. Life itself could maintain the planet fit for life - within limits. Which is a cool result. But like fractal mathematics, it means little without access to a simulator.

When I first began my CourseWare initiative at Yale University in 1997, I picked DaisyWorld as a proof of concept, for the more ambitious sort of online scientific simulators newly made possible by Java applet technology. Not only could we make the math an experience, but via the Web, save all the distribution and software updating and installation and cross-platform barriers to developing educational software. CourseWare made it possible to combine scientific research simulators, with a professor's teaching mission, at a cost affordable within grant budgets. But first I had to develop the base CourseWare toolkit. DaisyWorld was the vehicle for that development.

This software is from the dawn of interactive graphics on the Web, but it's still popular.


image 3d DaisyBall is my custom variation on DaisyWorld, with multiple sites around a sphere. Each site is represented by a daisy. Different lattitudes receive different solar input. Daisy color shows the dominant daisy species at each site. Java 1.4.

Updated 2008-11, released 1998-01.



image 2d DaisyWorld is the classic model, demonstrating homeostasis via ecosystem feedback loops (daisy albedo). There is no spatial structure. The daisies show percent population at a single site. Used in teaching "Intro to the Earth System" at UCLA, among other non-Yale courses. Java 1.4.

Updated 2008-11, released 1998-01.



image I began to rewrite DaisyBall in ActionScript 3, hoping for a more general audience presentation - less focus on the mathematics, more on the concepts - with much prettier graphics. DaisyBall is surprisingly popular even in its too-scientific form. I think more people could enjoy it, down to high school level. But this is an unpaid, back-burner labor-of-love type thing. Flex3/AS3.

Unfinished.

Copyright © 2010 Ginger Booth