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This chapter looks at nine different modes of scientific activity pursued by Quakers and Jews. These range from the wealthy amateur — including several Jews who pursued science in an upper-class, gentlemanly fashion — to the Jews and Quakers who traded in scientific specimens. Members of both communities used science in their professional engineering careers. Likewise, both communities produced educationalists who taught science through their lectures and textbooks. Another way in which science was deployed was in the scientific study of their own religious communities through the use of statistics. But there are also some interesting differences. For example, several 18th century Jews were attracted to Newton’s ideas, which were generally ignored by Quakers.

This chapter examines the Hong Kong Observatory director August William Doberck's conflict with the Jesuit fathers leading to the construction of other observatories in Asia. These Jesuit fathers include Marc Dechevrens of the Shanghai Observatory and Federico Faura of the Manila Observatory. This chapter also discusses the possible problems for meteorologists in Asia caused by the wars in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

This chapter explores the social contours of the meteorological life. The goal is to situate the occupation within its organizational and social psychological constraints. It argues that the structure, culture, and interactions of operational meteorologists create the conditions in which weather forecasts are produced. In this case, it is the relationship of meteorology to science, to claims about the future, and to the communication of this knowledge that are at issue. The chapter begins with the place and space in which meteorology is done, moving inward to work relations, the links between humans and machines, and labor under conditions of stress and threat. Although meteorologists work for numerous organizations, the focus is on government employees, the authors of official weather information and keepers of the equipment that produces this information.

What does it mean to be a meteorological scientist and how is this claim linked to the microculture of groups of meteorologists? Forecasters are assigned different tasks and define their occupation in various ways. Having examined three local offices of the National Weather Service, this chapter argues that any orientation toward science and work is created by groups with their own shared pasts. Local conditions matter. By examining the office culture at the Chicago office, their impressions of other offices, and those offices' images of the Chicago office, it is argued that the relationship between particular work tasks and occupational identity varies, an outcome of tradition, resources, and organizational structure.

This chapter explores the production of the future. How do meteorologists create forecasts to contain uncertainty? Meteorologists rely on gathered data in conjunction with models that provide a theoretical infrastructure. This affects the data to be collected. But if this was all that was necessary, forecasters would not be needed, so humans carve out a domain of personal expertise, selecting among alternate models, doubting the adequacy of data, and then adding their own experience. Armed with data, theory, and experience, the organization provides legitimacy that is crucial for the presentation of these public predictions. Meteorologists, like other future workers, are authorized to predict by their sponsors. They are mandated to colonize the future.

This chapter explores public science as communication. Specifically, it addresses four aspects of the occupational tasks of meteorologists: how they coordinate their forecasts with others inside their office and with other National Weather Service offices; the art of writing forecasts and forecast discussions, suggesting how meteorologists think about their words; how forecasters at the Storm Prediction Center use visual representations (“boxes”) to claim their authority, emphasizing that communication is not necessarily tied to words; and the technological change the author of this book observed during his research in which a computerized forecast system was introduced. In this system meteorologists manipulated a database, which removed the authority to create the written forecast from the meteorologist.

This chapter discusses how Carl-Gustav Rossby’s research school not only influenced international meteorology generally, but also overcame the initial skepticism of both theoretical and applied meteorologists who doubted that numerical weather prediction was a valid and necessary technique for extending meteorological theory and improving weather forecasting. Founder of two meteorology programs in the United States (those at MIT and the University of Chicago), responsible for wartime training, and founder of the first peer-reviewed meteorological journal in the United States and of a Swedish journal aimed at the broader international geophysics community, Rossby was in the perfect position to convince the international meteorological community of the wisdom of numerical weather prediction. Providing a series of Scandinavian meteorologists who could bridge the gap between synoptic (current weather analysis) and dynamic (atmospheric motions) meteorology, he played a significant and largely unheralded role in the successful development of numerical weather-prediction techniques.

This chapter discusses how US congressmen, especially Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico, attempted to regulate weather control as a potential weapon to use offensively against enemies, diplomatic tool to keep allies within and bring non-aligned nations into the West Bloc, and domestic tool to keep the nation secure and its economy strong. Starting in fall 1950, Anderson and others introduced a variety of legislation that would have placed weather control firmly in the hands of the American state and kept it there with a Weather Control Commission modeled on the Atomic Energy Commission. But major stakeholders—military services, commercial meteorologists, and academic meteorologists—pushed back. The military wanted total control, the commercial meteorologists wanted no control, and the academics thought there was no control possible. Ultimately, Congress settled on the creation of a temporary Advisory Committee on Weather Control that would assess experimental and operational results and recommend further action to the president. The recommendation: continue conducting research on weather control. The day-to-day regulation of weather control? That was left to individual states.

This chapter addresses the work of meteorologists during the 1950s as they focused on understanding the underlying physics of precipitation processes. The weather control juggernaut, however, threatened to discredit the scientific reputation that meteorologists had earned during World War II, and so these scientists were pulled from their data and equations into science policy. The American Meteorological Society, for example, produced a policy statement and attempted to influence congressional efforts to regulate weather control. But meteorologists were not in agreement; some supported weather control research and others considered it a waste of time and money. Consequently, the weather control research agenda—within and outside the United States—took two separate paths: one attacked cloud physics and precipitation mechanisms while developing viable theoretical underpinnings, while the other looked for practical methods of controlling the weather. The Advisory Committee on Weather Control then took those results and recommended that the National Science Foundation become the overseer of US research efforts and that the US Congress fund them to do so.