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Meteorologica
Fri Nov 26, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. It's a pretty safe bet that people have
been thinking about the weather for as long as they've been thinking, but the Greek
philosopher Aristotle was the first person to organize and record his weather thoughts
in a systematic way. In a book he called "Meteorologica," which dates to around 340
BC, Aristotle dealt with the properties and processes of everything that happens
between the surface of the earth and the orbit of the moon -- from comets to clouds.
Aristotle grappled with a lot of the questions that weather researchers still study today:
- the cause of lightning, why seasonal rainfall varies from region to region, the
relationship between cloud height and precipitation, and the origin of wind direction
and speed.
The questions were sound; unfortunately most of the answers were wrong. Aristotle's
core problem was that he based all his explanations on two false assumptions: - first,
that the earth is at the center of the cosmos; and second, and even more erroneous,
that only four elements—earth, water, air and fire—make up everything in our world,
including weather. Aristotle kept trying to squeeze all atmospheric phenomena into this
four-element theory, and his beliefs held sway right up through the Middle Ages.
Aristotle's "Meteorologica" did not give us a sound foundation for weather science,- but
the book did establish meteorology as a distinct discipline for study and, more
importantly, it grounded the new science on the assumption that whatever happens in
the sky has a rational explanation. And of course the book had a catchy title: - after all,
we're still using it more than 2,000 years later.
The Weather Notebook is produced by the Mount Washington Observatory; check out
the weather right now, at www.mountwashington.org. We also receive funding from
Subaru of America. Thanks today to Marketing Manager Melody Nester.
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