Page 68 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

communitarian campaign was taken over by innumerable practitioners in the
seventeenth century. His greatest legacy, without doubt, was institutional, in
that his outlook was absorbed by the Royal Society of London and by many
other scientific societies.

scientific revolutions “de l’air”

The “scientific revolution,” although subject to intense historiographic debate,
is a term that commonly refers to the transformation of thought about nature
through which the authority of ancient texts was replaced by the “mechanical
philosophy” and methodology of modern science. Most, but not all, historians
see it as a series of events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or, more
narrowly, from 1543 (De Revolutionibus of Copernicus) to 1687 (Principia of
Newton). The standard accounts privilege astronomy, physics, and medicine,
but also in this era natural philosophers turned away from the traditional prac-
tice of preparing commentaries on Aristotle’s Meteorologica and instead began
focusing on new techniques for describing, measuring, and weighing the atmo-
sphere. Behind this turn was the hope that somehow quantification might lead
to understanding and trigger a cascade of new capabilities, including predic-
tion and control. Beginning with the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, the
scientific societies of Europe attempted to make histories of the weather and
promoted the collection, compilation, dissemination, and discussion of meteo-
rological observations from remote locations and over widespread areas of the
globe. Adherents of the new mechanical and chemical philosophy insisted that
all atmospheric phenomena could be reduced to their component processes and
could be explained by an emerging body of natural laws. They developed new
instruments—thermometers, barometers, hygrometers, and calibrated rain gaug-
es—for observing and quantifying aspects of the atmosphere. New practices and
perspectives meant that henceforth no atmospheric process, however seemingly
insignificant, would be left unrecorded. As a result, a culture of measurement
emerged, linked to a new meteorological science of planetary proportions. This
“descent, with variation,” of viable meteorological instruments, so proudly traced
by scientists and historians, is only one aspect of the story, since many techniques
resulted in dead ends—in extinct or forgotten practices. The lack of uniform
standards and global and temporal coverage, however, remained a continuing
challenge. 4
In 1949 one of the early champions of the idea of a scientific revolution, the
historian Herbert Butterfield, wrote the following:

rain makers | 51