Clavius

When Æon finally gets to the literal bottom of Goodchild’s plan, penetrating his secret bunker inside Clavius’ body, she scoffs: “I thought you had an operation here. I thought you were getting some work done. Where is the smoke-filled room? Where are the sleazy characters?”

A couple of years ago, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy detected water molecules in the Clavius Crater, one of the largest lunar craters visible from Earth.

If Clavius was still insisting on it fifty-five years later, it was not because it was contentious; it was simply that he was providing a commentary for Sacrobosco’s Sphere, which was still the textbook in every university.

No textbook emerged capable of replacing Sacrobosco, Peuerbach and Clavius for the simple reason that no new consensus was established on the question of how the universe was organized until the eventual triumph of Newtonianism well into the eighteenth century—by which point the vernacular languages had replaced Latin, so no textbook could hope to have the international presence that they had had.

Clavius’s argument here is identical with that of modern realists who claim that science must approximate to the truth, otherwise it would not be able to make successful predictions.