Fixing the Sky by James Rodger Fleming

experimental spaces, researchers 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 educing axioms, and from established axioms, again new experiments.” 3 “New discoveries,” 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
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 practice of preparing commentaries on Aristotle’s Meteorologica and instead began focusing on new techniques for describing, measuring, and weighing the atmosphere. Behind this turn was the hope that somehow quantification might lead to understanding and trigger a cascade of new capabilities, including prediction 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 meteorological 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 gauges—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