Page 67 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

and experiments constraining nature to operate under human control. Thus gen-
tle rains falling from the sky may water a garden naturally; rainmaking, which
seeks to bond and bend natural processes, is a violent or forced act, a monstros-
ity; and designed irrigation systems, employed by many agriculturalists, consti-
tute artifice. To cite another example of the three states, a shade tree and a gentle
breeze may provide some respite on a hot day; towing icebergs to lower latitudes
or turning the blue sky milky white with sulfate aerosols to attenuate sunbeams,
however, would be violent acts involving forced motions and would constitute
errors of potentially monstrous proportions; and the design of building ventila-
tion and cooling systems, subject to individual choice, is clearly within the realm
of artifice. As a third example, the eruption of a volcano is considered a force of
nature; making an artificial volcano or otherwise tinkering with an existing one
would certainly be a mistake; but deflecting lava flows around a village is an arti-
ficial but useful thing to do.
In New Atlantis (1624), the scientists of Solomon’s House practice both obser-
vation and manipulation of the weather: “We have high towers . . . for the view
of divers meteors—as winds, rain, snow, hail, and some of the fiery meteors also.
And upon them in some places are dwellings of hermits, whom we visit some-
times and instruct what to observe . . . and engines for multiplying and enforcing
of winds to set also on divers motions.” In great experimental spaces, researchers
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imitate and demonstrate natural meteors such as snow, hail, rain, thunder, and
lightning and “some artificial rains of bodies and not of water” (400). Three
so-called mystery men are in charge of expanding the repertoire of practices
not yet brought into the arts, and three pioneers or miners try new experiments
“such as themselves think good” (410); that is, they manipulate nature without
further review or oversight, a task requiring perfect virtue and judgment by
the experimentalists.
Bacon was conversant with a venerable humanistic tradition that divided
history into three parts—ancient, medieval, and modern—but his valuation
of the three eras was asymmetric. He granted grudging respect to the ancients,
denigrated the Middle Ages, and elevated modern accomplishments to equal or
soon-to-be-greater status than those of antiquity. For Bacon, the rise of modern
science was due to “the true method of experience . . . commencing . . . with
experience duly ordered and digested, not bungling or erratic, and from it educ-
3
ing axioms, and from established axioms, again new experiments.” “New dis-
coveries,” Bacon argued, “must be sought from the light of nature, not fetched
back out of the darkness of antiquity” (154). He elaborated at length on his new
method, calling for researchers to work together and making the important
point that the sciences were about to enter a period of great fertility. Bacon’s

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