Meteorology

There are a number of ways we can mark the change of season.

Meteorologically, where we mark the seasons by the change in weather.

Phenologically, where we see with our own eyes little buds poking their faces out of the ground in springtime, snow and ice in winter, or leaves falling from the trees in autumn.

Commercials and marketing.

We just have Wi-Fi.

And yeah, science gives us predictive tools that ancient humans didn't possess, like Meteorology isn't the same thing as reading bird flight.

Let's not become so spiritually open-minded that we forget why airplanes don't consult an oracle before takeoff.

But, symbolic practices may have been doing something other than simply forecasting external events.

And this one has been in the works for a couple years.

So he got his bachelor's, his MS, and his PhD in physical meteorology from Florida State University.

He's been a NASA researcher, the president of the American Meteorological Society, where he now holds a rare distinction of being a fellow.

He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for weather and climate research by the White House.

I hope someone brings cookies to your garage.

And if anyone left a review, know I have read it.

Okay, let's get into meteorology.

Legend has it the field was named by Aristotle, who wrote a tome about weather and named it Meteorologica, from a root word meteor for lofty, so stuff above us.

Is it? No.

Meteorologically, it is the sixth day of fall because meteorologists place the beginning of fall on September 1st.

But astronomically, it is September 21st, whenever the equinox is, which I think is the 21st.

I didn't realize that meteorological and astronomical were different.

And such a knowledge of the past as we have is not all of the same sort, or derived from the same sources.

let us consider just what an educated man of to-day knows of the past first of all he has the realest of all knowledge the knowledge of his own personal experiences his memory uneducated people believe their memories absolutely and most educated people believe them with a few reservations some of us take up a critical attitude even toward our own memories we know that they not only sometimes drop things out but that sometimes a sort of dreaming or a strong suggestion will put things in but for all that memory remains vivid and real as no other knowledge can be and to have seen and heard and felt is to be nearest to absolute conviction yet our memory of direct impressions is only the smallest part of what we know outside that bright area comes knowledge of a different order the knowledge brought to us by other people outside our immediate personal memory there comes this wider area of facts or quasi facts told us by more or less trustworthy people told us by word of mouth or by the written word of living and of dead writers this is the past of report rumour tradition and history the second sort of knowledge of the past the nearer knowledge of this sort is abundant and clear and detailed remoter it becomes vaguer still more remotely in time and space it dies down to brief imperfect inscriptions and enigmatical tradition and at last dies away so far as the records and traditions of humanity go into a doubt and darkness as blank just as blank as futurity and now let me remind you that this second zone of knowledge outside the bright area of what we have felt and witnessed and handled for ourselves this zone of hearsay and history and tradition completed the whole knowledge of the past that was accessible to shakespeare for example to these limits man's knowledge of the past was absolutely confined save for some inklings and guesses save for some small almost negligible beginnings until the nineteenth century began besides the correct knowledge of this scheme of hearsay and history a man had a certain amount of legend and error that rounded off the picture in a very satisfactory and misleading way according to bishop usher just exactly four thousand and four years b c and that was man's universal history that was his all until the scientific epoch began and beyond those limits well i suppose the educated man of the sixteenth century was as certain of the non-existence of anything before the creation of the world as he was and as most of us are still of the practical non-existence of the future or at any rate he was as satisfied of the impossibility of knowledge in the one direction as in the other but modern science that is to say the relentless systematic criticism of phenomena has in the past hundred years absolutely destroyed the conception of a finitely distant beginning of things has abolished such limits to the past as a dated creation set and added an enormous vista to that limited sixteenth-century outlook and what i would insist upon is that this further knowledge is a new kind of knowledge obtained in a new kind of way we know to-day quite as confidently and in many respects more intimately than we know sargon or zenobia or caractacus the form and the habits of creatures that no living being has ever met that no human eye has ever regarded and the character of scenery that no man has ever seen or can ever possibly see we picture to ourselves the labyrinthodon raising its clumsy head above the water of the carboniferous swamps in which he lived and we figure the pterodactyls those great bird lizards flapping their way athwart the forests of the mesozoic age with exactly the same certainty as that with which we picture the rhinoceros or the vulture i doubt no more about the facts of this farther picture than i do about those in the nearest i believe in the megatherium which i have never seen as confidently as i believe in the hippopotamus that has engulfed buns from my hand a vast amount of detail in that farther picture is now fixed and finite for all time and a countless number of investigators are persistently and confidently enlarging amplifying correcting and pushing farther and farther back the boundaries of this greater past this pre-human past that the scientific criticism of existing phenomena has discovered and restored and brought for the first time into the world of human thought we have become possessed of a new and once unsuspected history of the world of which all the history that was known for example to dr johnson is only the brief concluding chapter and even that concluding chapter has been greatly enlarged and corrected by the exploring archologists working strictly upon the lines of the new method that is to say the comparison and criticism of suggestive facts i want particularly to insist upon this that all this outer past this non-historical past is the product of a new and keener habit of inquiry and no sort of revelation it is simply due to a new and more critical way of looking at things our knowledge of the geological past clear and definite as it has become is of a different and lower order than the knowledge of our memory and yet of a quite practicable and trustworthy order a knowledge good enough to go upon and if one were to speak of the private memory as the personal past of the next wider area of knowledge as the traditional or historical past then one might call all that great and inspiring background of remoter geological time the inductive past and this great discovery of the inductive past was got by the discussion and rediscussion and effective criticism of a number of existing facts odd-shaped lumps of stone streaks and bandings in quarries and cliffs anatomical and developmental detail that had always been about in the world that had been lying at the feet of mankind so long as mankind had existed but that no one had ever dreamed before could supply any information at all much more reveal such astounding and enlightening vistas looked at in a new way they became sources of dazzling and penetrating light the remoter past lit up and became a picture considered as effects compared and criticised they yielded a clairvoyant vision of the history of interminable years and now if it has been possible for men by picking out a number of suggestive and significant-looking things in the present by comparing them criticising them and discussing them with a perpetual insistence upon why without any guiding tradition and indeed in the teeth of established beliefs to construct this amazing searchlight of inference into the remoter past is it really after all such an extravagant and hopeless thing to suggest that by seeking for operating causes instead of for fossils and by criticising them as persistently and thoroughly as the geological record has been criticised it may be possible to throw a searchlight of inference forward instead of backward and to attain to a knowledge of coming things as clear as universally convincing and infinitely more important to mankind than the clear vision of the past that geology has opened to us during the nineteenth century let us grant that anything to correspond with the memory anything having the same relation to the future that memory has to the past is out of the question we cannot imagine of course that we can ever know any personal future to correspond with our personal past or any traditional future to correspond with our traditional past but the possibility of an inductive future to correspond with that great inductive past of geology and archaeology is an altogether different thing i must confess that i believe quite firmly that an inductive knowledge of a great number of things in the future is becoming a human possibility i believe that the time is drawing near when it will be possible to suggest a systematic exploration of the future and you must not judge the practicability of this enterprise by the failures of the past so far nothing has been attempted so far no first-class mind has ever focused itself upon these issues but suppose the laws of social and political development for example were given as many brains were given as much attention criticism and discussion as we have given to the laws of chemical combination during the past fifty years what might we not expect to the popular mind of to-day there is something very difficult in such a suggestion soberly made but here in this institution the royal institution of london which has watched for a whole century over the splendid adolescence of science and where the spirit of science is surely understood you will know that as a matter of fact prophecy has always been inseparably associated with the idea of scientific research the popular idea of scientific investigation is a vehement aimless collection of little facts collected as a bower bird collects shells and pebbles in methodical little rows and out of this process in some manner unknown to the popular mind certain conjuring tricks the celebrated wonders of science in a sort of accidental way emerge the popular conception of all discovery is accident but you will know that the essential thing in the scientific process is not the collection of facts but the analysis of facts facts are the raw material and not the substance of science it is analysis that has given us all ordered knowledge and you know that the aim and the test and the justification of the scientific process is not a marketable conjuring trick but prophecy until a scientific theory yields confident forecasts you know it is unsound and tentative it is mere theorizing as evanescent as art talk or the phantoms politicians talk about the splendid body of gravitational astronomy for example establishes itself upon the certain forecast of stellar movements and you would absolutely refuse to believe its amazing assertions if it were not for these same unerring forecasts the whole body of medical science aims and claims the ability to diagnose Meteorology constantly and persistently aims at prophecy, and it will never stand in a place of honor until it can certainly foretell.

The chemist forecasts elements before he meets them.

It is very properly his boast, and the splendid manner in which the mind of Clark Maxwell reached in front of all experiments and foretold those things that Marconi has materialized is familiar to us all.

Memorial Day weekend just feels like it's the kickoff.

And that almost lines up with Meteorological.

It almost does, yeah.

It's only like a week off from the Meteorological.

You're right, yeah.

But that one's more fluid.