One of these areas that has been made artificially difficult – the connection between scientific thought and the rest of life – comes out quaintly in the sharp debate about the implications of the name Gaia itself. That name arose when Lovelock told his friend, the novelist William Golding, that people found it hard to grasp his idea, and Golding promptly replied ‘Why don’t you call it Gaia?’, which is the name of the Greek earth-goddess, mother of gods and men. That name, when he used it, did indeed rouse much more interest in the theory. Many people who had not previously understood it now grasped it and thought it useful. Others, however, particularly in the scientific establishment, now rejected it so violently that they refused to attend to the details of it altogether.