# Science is driven forward by problems, not observations Why is it that for millennia humans chose to focus their attention on starts and planets, and not the clouds? Consider this: clouds wander even more than planets do. This unpredictable wandering was presumably familiar long before planets were discovered. Moreover, predicting the weather would always have been valuable to farmers, seafarers and soldiers, so there would always have been an incentive to theorize about how clouds move. Yet it was not meteorology that blazed the trail for modern science, but astronomy. Observational evidence about meteorology was far more readily available than in astronomy, but no one paid much attention to it, and no one induced any theories from it about cold fronts or anticyclones. The history of science was not crowded with disputes, dogmas, heresies, speculations and elaborate theories about the nature of clouds and their motion. Why? Because under the established explanatory structure for weather, it was perfectly comprehensible that cloud motion should be unpredictable. Common sense suggests that clouds move with the wind. When they drift in other directions, it is reasonable to surmise that the wind can be different at different altitudes, and is rather unpredictable, and so it is easy to conclude that there is no more to be explained. Some people, no doubt, took this view about planets, and assumed that they were just glowing objects on the celestial sphere, blown about by high-altitude winds, or perhaps moved by angels, and that there was no more to be explained. But others were not satisfied with that, and guessed that there were deeper explanations behind the wandering of planets. So they searched for such explanations, and found them. At various times in the history of astronomy there appeared to be a mass of unexplained observational evidence; at other times only a scintilla, or none at all. But always, if people had chosen what to theorize about according to the cumulative number of observations of particular phenomena, they would have chosen clouds rather than planets. Yet they chose planets, and for diverse reasons. Some reasons depended on preconceptions about how cosmology ought to be, or on arguments advanced by ancient philosophers, or on mystical numerology. Some were based on the physics of the day, others on mathematics or geometry. Some have turned out to have objective merit, others not. But every one of them amounted to this: it seemed to someone that the existing explanations could and should be improved upon. --- Date: 20241018 Links to: [Fabric of Reality](Fabric%20of%20Reality.md) pg 63 Tags: References: * []()