by florid_snow » Mon Feb 25, 2019 9:31 pm
I would like to defend the position that meteorology and astronomy (and history!) are different fields. Perhaps we are all trying to express the importance of the history of the separation of scientific fields. I am a meteorologist and I appreciate APOD's expression of the fuzziness between these fields, precisely because of the value that comes from clarifying their separation, historically and presently.
I mean, meteorology is so-named because the field is concerned with understanding when rain, hail, and other hydro-meteors will fall from heaven! Aristotle thought of meteorology as a subcategory of astronomy, and he was mostly wrong (which means he was a little bit right.) But the magnitude of the misunderstanding that western culture (and the rest of the world) had about the nature of the sky, "heaven", meteors and hailstones, etc., cannot be overstated.
Besides all that "revolutionary" stuff, Tycho Brahe's coordinated measurements were the first to show that comets must be much farther away than the upper atmosphere as previously assumed. Separating the church from science and heaven from the sky is an important story from the time, but it also means we've only had a few centuries to scientifically deal with the separation of scales from the upper atmosphere to outer-space. There, at the top of the atmosphere where red sprites occur, the boundary with space is quite fuzzy, and the boundary between the sciences is as well!
I would like to defend the position that meteorology and astronomy (and history!) are different fields. Perhaps we are all trying to express the importance of the history of the separation of scientific fields. I am a meteorologist and I appreciate APOD's expression of the fuzziness between these fields, precisely because of the value that comes from clarifying their separation, historically and presently.
I mean, meteorology is so-named because the field is concerned with understanding when rain, hail, and other hydro-meteors will fall from heaven! Aristotle thought of meteorology as a subcategory of astronomy, and he was mostly wrong (which means he was a little bit right.) But the magnitude of the misunderstanding that western culture (and the rest of the world) had about the nature of the sky, "heaven", meteors and hailstones, etc., cannot be overstated.
Besides all that "revolutionary" stuff, Tycho Brahe's coordinated measurements were the first to show that comets must be much farther away than the upper atmosphere as previously assumed. Separating the church from science and heaven from the sky is an important story from the time, but it also means we've only had a few centuries to scientifically deal with the separation of scales from the upper atmosphere to outer-space. There, at the top of the atmosphere where red sprites occur, the boundary with space is quite fuzzy, and the boundary between the sciences is as well!