Lo!

It takes its derisive title from the tendency of astronomers in Fort's days to make positivistic, overly precise, and premature announcements of celestial events and discoveries. Fort portrays them as quack prophets, sententiously pointing towards the skies -- inaccurately, as events turn out.

Astronomy was in vogue since the discovery of the Planet Pluto, supposedly by calculation. Astronomers were frequently cited in the press making extraordinarily precise claims, which subsequent events did not confirm regarding the orbits of comets, transits of the Sun, and other subjects. Fort may have had a point--the discovery of Pluto was not quite the triumph of mathematical astronomy that was portrayed in the popular press and scientific journals, and had an element of the accidental. Most comets or other bodies are still more likely to be discovered by the comparison of a time series of images of a sector of the sky, than by a priori celestial mechanics. Once discovered, a retroactive viewing of such images may show the new body was recorded years earlier.

Fort seems to have been among the many people skeptical of Albert Einstein's theories of relativity and the claim that these could be confirmed by a transit of the Sun. He was skeptical of the accuracy of the mathematics and the observations involved, and pointed out many seeming contradictions and anomalies in scientific pronunciamentos in the press. He rightly pointed out that many astronomical calculations were overly precise: just because you can carry out a calculation to eight places below the decimal doesn't mean that you should.

Some of this criticism was well-founded and some of it was nit-picking. For example it is easy enough to understand today why comets and asteroids failed to perform as advertised--we now know much more about the chaotic orbits and composition of these bodies. But in Fort's day, the neat, deterministic Euclidian or Newtonian simplicity of the solar system prevailed in the minds of many scientists, much less journalists and the public. Eddington famously calculated the number of protons in the Universe down to the very last proton, which would astonish a physicist today.

We now know that much of the solar system can only be considered debris of innumerable unrecorded collisions and gravitational stresses. Not only is it impossible to anticipate the chaotic behaviour of the immense numbers of bodies in question, it is potentially a mathematical impossiblity seeing as mathematicians have not solved the problem of calculating the gravitational interactions of three bodies, much less trillions. Little wonder that flying rock-piles and snowballs do not behave in a simple, deterministic manner.

Fort's bone-picking with astronomy illustrates the strengths and the weaknesses of his empirical methods and phenomenological philosophy. The positivism which he so gleefully attacked is still with us, but many of his anomalies and criticisms have now been incorporated into modern science. Fort would have appreciated the irony--indeed the inevitability--of much of his damned data coming in from the cold and being welcomed in the comfortable pews of orthodoxy.

Our knowledge of the aeolian zone, the thermosphere, and other complexities, where early twentieth century science dogmatically asserted a simpler scheme of things means that, ironically, much of Fort's damned data is now perfectly respectable. Forteans have to keep up a constant search for new anomalies and new absurdities to challenge and amuse themselves.