Science Quote by Antoine Lavoisier

You can hear the Enlightenment clearing its throat: modesty as a rhetorical strategy, ambition as the real engine. Lavoisier doesn’t claim to “know” tomorrow’s weather; he claims it is “almost possible” to “predict,” “within a rather broad range of probability.” That hedging isn’t weakness. It’s the scientist’s power move in an era still disentangling nature from omen. He’s staking out a new kind of authority: not prophetic certainty, but quantified likelihood. The phrasing teaches the reader how to trust science without demanding miracles from it.

The subtext is institutional. “It is even thought…” quietly points to a community of investigators and the emerging idea that knowledge is produced collectively, then circulated. And that circulation matters. The throwaway line about “publish daily forecasts” is less about clouds than about infrastructure: measurement networks, standardization, printing, public appetite. Forecasting becomes a civic technology, the kind of information that reorganizes daily life and commerce once it’s routine.

Context sharpens the stakes. Lavoisier is a founding figure of modern chemistry, a man who turned messy phenomena into balances, numbers, systems. Weather, slippery and local, is the next frontier for that sensibility. The unfinished “useful to soci-” (surely “society”) is telling: utility is the Enlightenment’s moral alibi. Knowledge earns its keep by serving the public.

Read it now and it lands like a prototype of our modern bargain with science: accept uncertainty, and you get a forecast anyway.