"However great the progress of the sciences," wrote French astronomer François Arago in 1846, "principled savants who care for their reputation will never venture to predict the weather."

    Why does weather fascinate? Surely it's one science we can experience easily. Maybe we like it because it's old-fashioned soothsaying. At best, weather is a gamble.

    Science and Technology professor Katharine Anderson would probably agree. Anderson is working on a book about weather (Prophecy and Prediction: Weather Science in Victorian Britain). "Despite meteorology being a science, our ideas about the weather are informed by a much older sense of unpredictability," says Anderson.

    "Looking at weather science is a way of looking at how we think about science itself, how we give science authority. It has a bearing on how, and who, we determine to be an expert," she says.

    Anderson stumbled on the idea of researching weather because of work she was doing on disasters. "The whole field of weather forecasting is tailor-made for research," says Anderson. "Nobody has done much with it."

    Anderson says meteorology is a perfect way to look at science because, as a flawed and public example of scientific prognostication, it offers a way to examine the historical identity of prediction. Anderson argues that the weight of why we respect science has to do with our acceptance of the accuracy of prediction. Unfortunately for meteorology, forecasting has been often inaccurate.

    "I guess you could say I'm tracking the history of perception. I'm interested in why science has so much power in our society. Looking at weather gives me a way to 'deconstruct' our beliefs about experts, about what real knowledge is," she says.

    "Science is a belief system. We take the word of science as gospel. I think we're slowly realizing that science is only one way of knowing about the world, but there are other ways, too."