Putting humanity in its place
If there’s one thing Charles Langmuir wants to give people, it’s a sense of scale. The scale of their lives in human history, of human history in the lifetime of the Earth, and of the Earth in the long, broad span of the universe. In other words, he wants to give them a little humility. “You realize how small we are and that we are [just] a particle of the whole,” said Langmuir, Higgins Professor of Geochemistry and director of Harvard’s Mineralogical and Geological Museum. A better sense of proportion might influence behavior, he said, so that people act as a part of nature rather than just users of it. “It’s really what’s needed for the environmental problems we face,” Langmuir said. Langmuir is in a somewhat privileged position to size up humanity. For the past 10 years, he worked to update “How to Build a Habitable Planet” (1985), a legendary textbook in the geosciences known...