Analog SFF, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  So the 17th century revolution could not have happened in the 14th century. We may as well wish for the moon—which, come to think of it, is pretty much what kicked things off. But a 14th century revolution might have occurred in the 14th century, one based on minimae, Thomistic psychology, and all four Aristotelian aitia. It would have looked different than the one we got—less revolutionary, more “holistic,” lacking Cartesian dualism—but must revolutions come in only one flavor?

  Copyright (c) 2007 Michael F. Flynn

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  Libri consulti

  1. Aquinas, Thomas. On the eternity of the world, tr. Robert T. Miller.

  www.fordham.edu/halsall/ basis/aquinas-eternity.html#n1

  2. Aristotle. Collected works.

  classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/ physics.html

  3. Bacon, Roger. On experimental science. (Oxford, 1268)

  www.fordham.edu/halsall/ source/bacon2.html

  4. Brennan, Robert E. Thomistic Psychology. (Macmillan, 1941)

  5. Buridan, Jean. On the diurnal rotation of the earth.

  www.clas.ufl.edu/users/rhatch/HIS-SCI-STUDY-GUIDE/0039jeanBuridan.html

  6. Cantor, Norman. The Meaning of the Middle Ages. (Allyn and Bacon, 1973)

  7. Dear, Peter. Disciplining Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution. (University of Chicago Press, 1995)

  8. Draper, John William. History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. 8th ed. New York: Appleton, 1884.

  etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/ toccer

  9. Duhem, Pierre. Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science, tr. Roger Ariew and Peter Barker. (Hackett, 1996).

  10. Galilei, Galileo. Dialogues on the two chief systems of the world.

  www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/ projects/ftrials/galileo/dialogue.html

  11. Gies, Frances & Joseph Gies. Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel. (HarperPerennial, 1995).

  12. Gimpel, Jean. The Medieval Machine. (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976)

  13. Grant, Edward. The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages. (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  14. Grant, Edward. God and Reason in the Middle Ages. (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

  15. Gregory IX. Parens scientiarum. (Vatican, 1231)

  www.fhaugsburg.de/~harsch /Chronologia/Lspost13/GregoriusIX/ grescie.html

  16. Grosseteste, Robert. De iride, et al.:

  www.grosseteste.com/download.htm

  17. Jaki, Stanley. The Limits of a Limitless Science. (ISI Books, 2000)

  18. Kadhim, Najah. “Between Text and History: Re-establishing the Intellectual Link,"

  theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/betweentext andhistoryreestablishingthe intellectuallink/

  19. Kibre, Pearl & Nancy Siraisi. “The Institutional Setting: The Universities,” in (20)

  20. Lindberg, David C., ed. Science in the Middle Ages. (University of Chicago Press, 1978).

  21. Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science. (University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  22. Mahoney, Michael S. “Mathematics,” contained in (20).

  23. Manchester, William. A World Lit Only by Fire. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1992)

  24. Oresme, Nicholas. “On the diurnal motion of the earth,” from Livre du ciel et du monde. (Paris, 1377)

  web.clas.ufl.edu/users/ rhatch/pages/03-Sci-Rev/SCI-REV-Teaching/HIS-SCI-STUDY-GUIDE/0040 nicoleOresme.html

  25. Sivin, Nathan. “Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China—Or Didn't It?” At:

  ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~nsivin/ scirev.html

  26. Smith, A. Mark. “What is the History of Medieval Optics Really About?” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, v. 148, no. 2, June 2004.

  www.aps-pub.com/proceedings/1482/480202.pdf

  27. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

  plato.stanford.edu/contents .html

  28. Stock, Brian. “Science, Technology, and Economic Progress in the Early Middle Ages,” contained in (20).

  29. Tanzella-Nitti, Giuseppe. “The Aristotelian-Thomistic Concept of Nature and the Contemporary Debate on the Meaning of Natural Laws,” Acta Philosophica, 6 (1997), pp. 237-264.

  www.disf.org/tanzella-nitti/pdf/3.Aristotelian.pdf

  30. Wallace, William. “The Philosophical Setting of Medieval Science,” in (21).

  31. Wallace, William. The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis. (Scholarly Book Services, 1997)

  32. White, Lynne. Medieval Technology and Social Change. (Oxford University Press, 1964).

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  THE LAST OF THE WEATHERMEN

  by RICHARD A. LOVETT

  * * * *

  Illustrated by Nicholas Jainschigg

  What's the difference between a tool and a drug?

  * * * *

  That's an impressive watch you're wearing. My grandkids would love the buttons. A sat-uplink? Good ol’ Dick Tracy, though I guess he was before your time—mine too, though not by so much that things like that don't make me think of his ... gads, what did he call it? Two-way something-or-other. The trouble with age is it eats holes in your memory: big blank ones where words used to be. Not that I'm complaining. Much, anyway. “Consider the alternative,” my wife used to say, God rest her soul.

  Oh, that was three or four years ago, but thanks. You never really get over it, which is probably why I hang out around here. Though I also like the view.

  So, what do you use a watch like that for? Market updates? I can see how a young guy like you might like that. No, forty-five's still young. When you get to my age, you'll want nice, safe investments, not things that have to be baby-sat. I'd rather not have to deal with some Euro market crisis at 2:00 A.M. I did enough of that the old-fashioned way.

  Can I buy you a drink? Well, okay, but the next one's on me. I'll have a pinot noir; it's still what we do best around here.

  I've never had a watch that fancy, but I knew it had to be multi-channel the moment I saw it. I may be a geezer, but I still read the mags. Wrist-radio! That's what Dick Tracy called it. In his time they'd never heard of satellites. No, he wasn't a real person. He was a comic-book hero, way back. But that thing's got to be more than just a sat-com. It's got too many ports, just for up-and-down.

  Local telemetry? Ah, so that's a med screamer. I've heard of ‘em, but never seen one. What's it monitor? Heart rate, EEG, EKG—wow, when I was your age, it took a hospital to do all that. What's it use for the blood chemistry, a nanoprobe? I don't think I could get used to having one of those stuck in me, even if you really can't feel it.

  I'm impressed by how small it is. The early weather-watches were clunkier and all they did other than the normal watch things was download the local ‘cast. Even now, I wish the screens were big enough to show a decent map. Professional habit, I guess. I like to see for myself what's coming at me.

  Oh, I was a meteorologist. No, that was about weather, not shooting stars. Kind of a dead profession, I suppose. They used to call us weathermen, back in the day. My name's Harvey, and I was pretty much the last of ‘em. I miss it sometimes.

  Yeah, maybe I should get a screamer, too, but I'm too old to die young. And even without that nanoprobe thing, I don't want to spend my time wired to some gadget that's going to baby-sit me, like you baby-sit your stocks. Tell me, do you know the signs of a heart attack? Yeah, falling down and clutching your chest is one of ‘em. That's the one you don't want to wait for. Any others? I thought not. That's the problem with gadgets: they're worse than age at turning your brain to Swiss cheese.

  You think that's funny?

  Let's grab those window seats over there before someone else gets ‘em. The best view's on that side because that's where the weather comes from. Once, I could do as well as the AcuCasts, simply by looking at the sky. See that sunset? Nobody knows what it means anymore, but when it turns red and pretty like that, the rain's clearing out. Otherwise, t
he light couldn't get through. The clear spot should be over us in a few hours, so if you're into golf, tomorrow should be great. Check it out if you don't believe me.

  No, it's not just a cute trick! Understanding the weather helped save my life once, and that's a fact. Let me get us another round, and I'll tell you about it.

  It was late October ... must have been twenty-seven years ago. I'd been working hard all summer, as though trying to see how fast I could work myself out of a job. Actually, I really was in a race: I still get royalties every time you check the ‘cast anywhere within a hundred miles of here. Better investment than anything I ever got from those midnight calls to my brokers, though it did wreck my first marriage.

  I worked so hard that for about six months I didn't even take a weekend off. I've always been an outdoors type, so that was a big loss. Then, just when I finally finished, we got this great spell of Indian summer, so I picked a mountain range out in Nevada, loaded a pack, and hit the road.

  Most folks think there's nothing in Nevada except Vegas and Reno. I hope they never learn. Did you know Nevada has more big mountains than any other state? If you know where to look, you can find aspens and wildflowers and glacial lakes. I was heading for the northeast corner, where there's a whole band of ten-thousand-footers, smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. I'd always wanted to go, but it was too remote, and I'd never found time. That was the year after my first wife left, before Ruth Anne, so I finally had my chance. I went by myself and didn't even tell anyone, which probably seems silly to you, but was heaven to me. And it wasn't the going solo that nearly did me in, I might add.

  Even driving in, I remember not liking the look of the sky. In the last two hundred miles, I must have stopped three times to check, but the satemetry hadn't changed. It might have been better if it had. Then I would have known something was wrong, and maybe I'd have started thinking rather than trusting. One of the things that trip did was make me a lot smarter about such things.

  On the car computer I had access to the full ‘cast, not just the GPS-coordinated things you get on the watches. There were showers in the mountains—that's why I kept stopping—but the computer insisted they would dissipate, except way down south in the Monitor Range, where a couple of models thought enough moisture might blow in from the Carson Sink to produce a few more.

  Not long before, I'd have loved that mixed report. It's the type of thing that forces models to evolve, particularly if the minority ‘cast is the one that proves right. But I was officially retired. All I really cared about was that I wasn't going to the Monitors.

  Where I was going, the predictions were consistent. The consensus, based on a reliability-weighted Bayesian assessment of something like thirty-nine models, was that by sunset, 10 P.M. at the latest, the showers would be gone and we'd be back in Indian summer.

  It's odd how the memory-holes eat some things but leave others. Why should I be able to recite something like that when the names of old friends vanish? These days, of course, the ‘casts don't bother to tell you that type of technical stuff because it's only geezers like me who have a prayer of knowing what it means. Hell, by now the models have probably evolved so far that nobody knows how they work. Even back then, the Nevada ones must have been self-correcting for years. Inland ‘casts are a lot simpler than those I'd been working on, this close to the coast.

  With all those stops, the drive took longer than expected, and when I got to the trailhead I either had to start hiking right away or camp and sit it out overnight. I had a three-day loop planned, and while I was in pretty good shape for a fifty-five-year-old, I really wanted to knock off a few miles that evening. So a few minutes later, there I was, walking up a canyon with the sky growling overhead and raindrops slicking the rock.

  I remember thinking that when I was in school, “showers” and “thunderstorms” weren't the same thing. But there wasn't much time to fret. At that time of year, it gets dark early. You've got to decide what you're going to do and do it, or you wind up trying to find a camping spot by flashlight, which is no fun. Believe me, I've had to do it a few times. This time, the main risk was that I'd wind up stuck in the middle of the washed-out jeep track my hiking guide called a troad.

  No, that's not a real word. It's an amalgam of “trail” and “road.” A bit too cute for my taste. But whatever you wanted to call it, it was nothing but rocks the size of pie pans. It was hard enough to walk on. Camping would have been miserable.

  I had a few bad moments when lightning started stabbing at the ridgelines on both sides of me. For a couple of miles I really did toy with giving up: going home and coming back next year. But I was thousands of feet below the summits, safe from being fried. And you never know, as you get older, when arthritis or bursitis or some other—itis you've never heard of might steal the backcountry from you forever. So, although I figured this was going to be a learning experience for the Northern Nevada models as well as those down in the Monitors, I kept walking.

  Meanwhile, I was noticing that the canyon didn't have the junipers, sagebrush, and limber pine you usually find at those elevations. Instead, there were honest-to-goodness spruce and fir. That meant it was unusually wet, so if it was going to rain anywhere, it would be here—though the models should have taken that into consideration.

  I suppose I should tell you a bit about modeling. Today's ‘casts are about 99.99 percent accurate, but when I was in grad school, forecasting was half art, half science. It might surprise you, but the first good models were for long-range ‘casts—in the range between two days and the time chaos theory says no model will ever work. With shorter-range predictions, the human advantage lay in intuition and understanding local conditions. It was something like me telling you tomorrow's weather, but subtler. The farther out you go, the more data you need, until, with the long-run stuff, you've got nothing but the models, so of course the computer's going to beat you. No problem, most of my colleagues figured. Short-range ‘casts would keep us in business. But I got to thinking and realized it was just a matter of time: the only way to stay employed long enough to earn a pension was to help write the models that put everyone else out of business. Royalties were something I only thought of later.

  Luckily, that night in Nevada the rain never amounted to much and about four miles in, just as it was getting seriously dark, I found a nice little campsite, right by a creek.

  The downside of October camping is that I was facing thirteen hours in an itsy, one-person tent. I tried to drag out dinner as long as possible, but by seven o'clock, I had to concede the evening to the cold. That was in the days before anyone had made a weather-watch smaller than a deck of cards, so I had a palm unit instead. I tried to check for updates, but my snug little campsite was too deep in the creek's ravine for the palm-gadget's low-power GPS unit, and without a GPS fix the palm was worthless—just like today's watches. I've always wished they'd just let you key your own coordinates into those things, but I've never seen one that allowed it. Most likely, the lawyers are afraid you'll push the wrong button and get the ‘cast for Australia or something, then sue ‘cause it ruined your picnic. It's the same mindset that puts all those safety devices on your car to protect the kids you no longer have, then makes it illegal to turn ‘em off. Still, when I crawled into my tent, I was starting to see stars, so it looked like the ‘cast had been wrong only about the lightning.

  That night, there was moonlight on my tent, so it must have been mostly clear. Morning was a different matter, with thin clouds that looked cold. On the oh-oh scale of things you don't want to see in the mountains, that's about a seven, because they mean there's weather around that at least wants to be a storm. So, after a quick breakfast, I took the palm unit and a cup of coffee and wandered around until I finally found a spot where the GPS could get a fix.

  The ‘cast hadn't changed, but even then I don't think I believed it. The same open spot that allowed the GPS to do its thing allowed me to see the ridgecrest, where the highest summits were playing peek-a-b
oo with clouds shaped like sideways teardrops. Technically, they're called lenticular clouds, and if you're one of the few people who pays attention to this stuff anymore, they raise the oh-oh scale to at least a nine. Worse, they mean wind. Lots of it.

  I never did find out what was wrong with the ‘cast. Perhaps I'd just gone so remote that nobody had bothered to tell the model about the spruce and fir and whatever produced enough rain for them to be there. But I'd also forgotten just how local a local ‘cast can be. Thanks to the GPS, I was getting a prediction for “down here” when what I wanted was one for “up there,” and while “here” and “there” were only a couple of miles apart, mountains make their own weather.

  At least I wasn't a total idiot. The moment I saw the clouds, I gave up my planned loop. It involved crossing the ridge, and there was no way I was putting it between me and my way out. But the ‘cast still lulled me into figuring I had time for a day-trip. Just to be on the safe side, though, I decided to lug my whole pack up the hill. My main concern was not to be too far from my survival gear if I twisted an ankle, but it proved to be the first truly smart thing I did on the entire trip.

  My destination was a lake, a couple hundred feet below the pass. With the pack, the trail was steep as hell, and as I climbed, the lenticular clouds got denser and lower. The ground was frozen solid, and the sky looked like Minnesota in January. Anything that fell from it was going to be white.

  The lake was a tiny tarn, surrounded by firs. A pretty spot if the weather had been appropriate for basking in the sun. More Minnesota, under present conditions. I dropped my pack and sat on it for a few minutes, then, already cold, scooted up to the ridgeline for a quick look at the other side. If there's a single, irresistible urge for hikers, looking over the top has got to be it.