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.

Like Clavius, we test our knowledge by doing things with it, which is the fundamental difference between our knowledge and most of the sciences of Montaigne’s day.

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.

Clavius and Kepler will have had no difficulty confirming immediately that Venus had phases: all they had to do was point a decent telescope in the right direction.