Podcaster: Andy Poniros
Title: An Informal Chat with Vatican Astronomer, Brother Guy Consolmagno
Organization: Cosmic Perspective
Link : http://www.lift-off.us ;
https://wpkn.org/wpkn-programming/cosmic-perspective/
Twitter : @Andy_SSA ; Andy@lift-off.us
Intro Music: Revised Version of “A Piece of Space History”, by Andy Poniros
Closing Outro Music: “Funk 2001”, by Larry Benigno
Description:
Director of the Vatican Observatory, Br Guy Consolmagno discusses the road taken in becoming a Vatican Astronomer, Science & Faith, & the Church’s contributions to science…including Galileo, the Gregorian Calendar, Gregor Mendel, & many more.
“Cosmic Perspective Radio” is an Andy Poniros Production
Bio: Andy Poniros is a JPL / NASA Solar System Ambassador, Amateur Astronomer, Telescope Builder, Science Reporter and “Cosmic Perspective” host on www.WPKN.org
Today’s sponsor: This episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is sponsored by, Andy Poniros. “Cosmic Perspective” is an Andy Poniros Production. For more information, you can go to www.lift-off.us.
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Transcript:
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
It’s the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, coming in 3, 2, 1.
[Sponsor Message]
This episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is sponsored by Andy Poneros. Cosmic Perspective is an Andy Poneros production. For more information, you can go to Liftoff.us. That’s www.lift-off.us. T-minus 15 seconds.
[Cosmic Perspective intro]
Guidance is internal. 12, 11, 10, 9, ignition sequence start. 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.
All engines run. Liftoff. We have a liftoff.
32 minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11.
[Speaker 3]
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing.
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept.
One we are willing to postpone. And one we intend to beat. Okay, engine stop.
[Cosmic Perspective intro]
Engine at a decent. Mode control mode on. Command, over.
413 is in.
[Speaker 3]
We copy you down, Eagle.
[Cosmic Perspective intro]
Houston, Tranquility Base here.
[Speaker 3]
The Eagle has landed.
[Andy Poniros]
Joining me today on Cosmic Perspective Radio is Vatican astronomer and the director of the Vatican Observatory, Brother Guy Consolmagno. Brother Guy, thanks for being with us again on Cosmic Perspective Radio. It’s been a while.
Thanks for being with us again today.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
It’s a delight to be here.
[Andy Poniros]
Brother Guy, you probably don’t know this, but there were two people that agreed to give me an interview when my radio show was basically just a dream. I hadn’t even had to put it together yet, and it hadn’t been aired. And you and Vera Rubin were the two people that agreed to give me an interview.
I got to say that when you both said yes, I thought that they’re going to have to peel me off the floor.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
I’m complimented to be even mentioned in the same breath as Vera Rubin. Wow.
[Andy Poniros]
I just didn’t expect that you would both say yes. Here’s a guy like me that’s a NASA volunteer. He wants to have a radio show.
But you both did say yes. You were my first two guests. I’ve done more than 150 Saturday shows over the years.
I think I’m in my 13th year now. So I want to thank you very much for saying yes.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
Well, you know, the funny thing is I’m not that surprised because the one thing I think you find in common among professional astronomers, we’re in it because we’re enthusiastic about it. You know, we’re certainly not in it for the money. And we love sharing the stuff we do.
I can remember, oh, 20 years ago, I had a year where I was doing a sabbatical at Fordham University. And once a week, I’d go down to the American Museum of Natural History to work in their meteorite lab. One day, as I’m walking up to the front door, who do I see on the street was Neil deGrasse Tyson talking to a tourist who had just walked by.
You know, what is this building? And he’s doing his whole, you know, you have to pay him $10,000 to give that spiel. He’s giving it for free to a tourist on the street because he’s so enthusiastic about the universe that we’re in.
[Andy Poniros]
Well, I got to say, I’ve never taken a course in astronomy. My degree is in electrical engineering. I’m a NASA volunteer.
Just about everybody at the radio station here, we’re all volunteers. And we do it for the love of it. It’s a passion that we have.
And what did Carl Sagan once say? When you’re in love, you want to tell everybody about it? Yep.
Yes, I want to thank you very much. This is amazing. You become an astronomer, you become a Jesuit, and you eventually become the director of the Vatican Observatory.
How does that all happen?
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
All clever planning. It wasn’t. A few years ago, I was talking to someone whose name I won’t mention.
He was a name I could drop if I was in the name-dropping business. And actually, I knew him because his daughter and I had been members of the MIT Science Fiction Society. So she’d invited me out to dinner with their family.
I got to meet this famous scientist. And later on, he wrote to a friend of his, oh, I’ve met this guy who’s figured out a really clever way to get his science funded. He joined the Jesuits and became a Vatican astronomer.
He didn’t know the guy he was writing was also a friend of mine. So that’s not why I became a Jesuit. I’m not that clever, I’m afraid.
But as a kid, I grew up in the space age. And in those days, World War II was just a very recent memory. Science had won the war, we were all told.
And the war was good against evil, and we were on the side of the good. So in that time, it felt like science and religion were on the same side. And the nuns in my Catholic grade school were the ones who taught me science and encouraged science, and even mentioned at one point that there existed a Vatican observatory.
So I knew about that. I knew that this was something that was blessed by the church. It never occurred to me that anybody could even imagine there might be a problem with faith and science.
What problem? To this day, when I talk about faith and science, that’s one of my first problems is, why do people think there is a problem? It’s just been natural to me.
When I was of the age to try to figure out what I wanted to do, first year in college, I thought about everything under the sun. I basically came down to entering the Jesuits as a priest, or going to MIT and reading science fiction. And after careful consideration and very deep and serious prayer, I went to MIT.
God knew better than I that I’m a nerd. I don’t have a lot of the people talents that the best sorts of priests can have. But going to MIT, I wound up in the Earth and Planetary Science Department and discovered meteorites.
Rocks that fall from the sky. You can hold pieces of outer space in your hand. What could be more exciting than that?
And that, in and out, was kind of my research until I was about 30 years old. By then I had a doctorate from Arizona, and a couple of five years post-docing at Harvard and MIT, which sounds impressive unless you know academia. Five years as a post-doc means couldn’t get a job.
So at that point, I thought I was going to give up science. And I joined the Peace Corps to go off and do some good. But the Peace Corps people wanted me to teach at the University of Nairobi, teaching astrophysics.
I discovered small college teaching. I said, this is what I want to do. Got a job at Lafayette College, a wonderful little college in Pennsylvania.
I was so in love with that. But that other dream of being a Jesuit hadn’t gone away. And then, and only then, did it occur to me that Jesuits have brothers, not just priests.
So I joined the Jesuits as a brother, thinking that I would be teaching at one of the Jesuit small colleges. Lafayette College was where I’d been. Loyola College was very similar in Baltimore.
That was my dream place. Instead, you take this vow of obedience along with poverty and chastity. I mean, poverty I was used to.
I’d been a grad student, and chastity I was used to. I’d been a grad student. But obedience, not so much.
Under obedience, I was instructed that I was being assigned to Rome, you know, eat that terrible Italian food, and to work at the Vatican Observatory, where they happened to have a collection of more than a thousand meteorites. So what can I say? It was, you know, divinely appointed.
Certainly not any planning on my end.
[Andy Poniros]
And you became the director of the observatory.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
About 10 years ago, yeah.
[Andy Poniros]
How long have you been a Vatican astronomer?
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
30 years. More than that. I arrived in 93, so it’s pushing 32 years.
Considering I couldn’t hold a job for more than three years at a place else before then, that’s kind of amazing.
[Andy Poniros]
A wonderful opportunity and a great experience. But I’m sure you get this question all the time. Why does the Vatican have astronomers?
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
It’s to surprise people. It’s to show the world that the Church actually embraces science. And, you know, when you get me started in the history of all of this, we invented science.
Science came out of the medieval universities. Science is actually a religious activity. Here’s what I mean.
Science is logic, right? Logic always has to start with axioms. You have to begin with whether they’re Euclid’s axioms about geometry and including parallel lines never meeting.
And if you relax over them, suddenly you’ve got the geometry of curved space. You have to start with axioms, which may be true, may not be true. They’re basically articles of faith.
What are the articles of faith you have to believe in if you’re going to be a scientist? You have to believe that the real world is real. You know, I’m not just a philosopher dreaming that I’m a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that I’m a philosopher.
I’m not living in the matrix. This is the real reality. You have to believe that.
You have to believe that the world operates under repeatable laws. How can you look for the laws of nature if you don’t believe there are laws there to be found? And who was the first person to think of that?
Because certainly if you thought nature operated the way it did because there were little deities inside of, you know, plants to make them grow or Zeus throwing thunderbolts. If that explains the physical world, then you don’t even have room to ask what are the laws of nature? So you’ve got to have a belief system that says there are no nature gods and therefore why do we have lightning?
Why do we have crops that grow? And the third thing you have to believe, and this is the most subtle one, you have to believe that the physical universe is so good that it’s worthy of spending your life trying to look at it. That it’s not enough just to say, oh yeah, stars are pretty, and I’ll go on and, you know, figure out what’s for lunch.
But rather to say, I’m going to spend my life studying those stars, figuring out how they move, figuring out how I can interpret the light from those stars that will tell me what they’re made out of, how hot they are, how they evolve over time, how the universe… All of these are questions that, frankly, aren’t going to make you rich. They’re not going to put food in your stomach.
People, you know, lived happy and fruitful and wonderful lives long before we understood the Big Bang Theory. And yet, we as human beings are richer. Our souls have been fed because we know more about the universe now than we did a hundred years ago or last year.
And, you know, that’s one of the things I’d actually gotten out of the Peace Corps experience, that even people living in poverty in rural Kenya, they look at the stars. They have the same questions that I had. They had the same reaction seeing the rings of Saturn through a little telescope that I had.
This is what makes us human.
[Andy Poniros]
I’ve said this many times on the show before, and that as humans, we’re explorers. It’s in us. That’s who we are.
But I also think that most people don’t realize that religious people have made huge contributions in science in the past and still do today in science.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
Well, let’s start with Galileo. Let’s grab it right there at the beginning. Everybody thinks that, oh, my gosh, Galileo had a brilliant idea and the church stomped on him.
You read the history, it’s not at all that simple. It wasn’t his idea. It was Copernicus’ idea.
He had been around for 80 years. Galileo was not stomped except for a year and a half when he was about 70 years old, and he had had a charmed life up to that time. So the whole Galileo issue will set aside and merely mention he was a good Catholic.
His two daughters were both nuns. Of course, he never married their mom. He was an Italian Catholic, but that’s the social mores of the time.
At the same time that he had come up with his telescope, there was a Jesuit named Zucchi who had the idea of a telescope that used mirrors rather than lenses. He invented the reflecting telescope. Newton perfected it another 50 years later than that.
The guy who came up with the modern theory of atoms was a Jesuit priest by the name of Boscovitch. Of course, we all know about genetics. Well, Gregor Mendel was a monk.
He was an Augustinian monk. If you look at the charger on your cell phone, you’ll see so many volts and so many amps. Volta, being an Italian, no surprise, was a Catholic.
Ampere, who lived during the French Revolution and into the 19th century, was not only a devout Catholic, he was fundamental in helping to found the St. Vincent de Paul Society. People don’t know that connection. And here’s the best of all.
Angelo Secchi, the greatest scientist you’ve never heard of, built a telescope on the roof of the St. Ignatius Church in Rome, put a prism in front of his objective lens, and then classified stars by their spectra. 5,000 stars. He was the one who invented stellar spectroscopy and stellar classification, the fundamental basis that, you know, goes into the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram nowadays.
Oh, and then there was, of course, George Lemaitre and the Big Bang Theory, also a Catholic priest.
[Andy Poniros]
What also amazes me is that Pope Gregory and a team of mathematicians that were all priests figured out the Gregorian calendar and made it work.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
It wasn’t that they couldn’t come up with an answer. The real miracle was the committee came up with and agreed on an answer that none of them had thought of. That someone from the outside had submitted, hey, here’s how to fix the calendar.
And they all said, yeah, that’s the way to do it. So, I mean, you’re looking for the existence of God right there. There is a miracle that you get a committee to, you know, decide on something as fundamental as that and come up with an answer that worked.
[Andy Poniros]
I am intrigued about how the Gregorian calendar came to be, but I don’t really completely understand it.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
It’s really a fascinating story because there are two ways you can have calendars. Calendars are basically ways of trying to keep track of changes in the situation on Earth. If you’re a sailor or if you’re a hunter that goes out at night, you want to know where the moon is.
And the tides are controlled by the moon. And so you’ll have a lunar calendar. If, on the other hand, you’re sitting in one place and you’re growing crops, you want to know where the seasons are.
You want to know when to plant, when to harvest. So that’s a solar calendar. The Jews had come up with a very complicated solar-lunar calendar, which meant every three years they had to throw in an extra month.
And it was kind of arbitrary. Sometimes they’d wait four years before throwing in an extra month because there are not an even number of months, you know, period from full moon to full moon in a year. It’s not even an even number of days per month, nor is there an even number of days per year.
So how do you come up with a calendar that can keep track of days and weeks and months and years? It’s mathematically really tricky. But the ancients were mathematically very clever.
By the time of Julius Caesar, they worked out a calendar that he endorsed and, you know, imposed on the Roman Empire that was then, you know, the status for the next 15 centuries, that a month was no longer from full moon to full moon, but there would be 12 periods of roughly the same length that would count as months. And they’d be a little bit longer, but they were sort of detached from the moon because the Italians never have been great sailors with certain obvious exceptions. And so it was more an agrarian calendar.
What they noticed was that if you’re going from the first day of spring to the first day of spring, which you can work out, you know, in the day and the night of the same length, there’s 365 and a little bit more. But if you added an extra day every four years, you could keep it on track. So they came up with the leap year.
And because of internal politics, February had been shortchanged for the number of days, so they gave February the extra day. And every fourth year would be a leap year. And that works so well that it’s off by less than one day per century.
But by 1500, it was off by about 10 days. And it was visible that the first day of spring was shifting, people trying to figure out when to plant. It wasn’t working out the way that it should have been.
Why was that important? It was important because the calendar was also used for religious reasons. The Jewish calendar had been both a lunar and a solar calendar, and the Jewish feast days were tied to the full moon.
So the biggest feast day, Passover, was the first full moon of the first day of the year, of the first month of the year. And that would be the first month of spring. Well, Christ was crucified on the Friday before Passover and rose from the dead the first Sunday after Passover.
To maintain this, they wanted to have a way of having the religious holidays continue to follow the idea that Easter would be the first Sunday after Passover. Passover is the first full moon after the first day of spring. They could have made it arbitrarily anything they wanted, because there’s nothing in Scripture that says it has to be this way.
In fact, you know, the only place where Scripture really talks about these holidays is where in one place Jesus says the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Have your Sabbaths when they’re convenient to you. But in 1500, there was an Eastern church and a Western church, and the last time that all the churches had been united, they had agreed that Easter would be the first Sunday after Passover.
They didn’t want to screw that up so that in some future day the churches got together, they wouldn’t be too far off. Well, what happens if the first day of spring is a Sunday? What happens if the first full moon is on a Sunday?
And you can say, okay, if the first full moon is on a Sunday, it’s a Sunday after it, because it’s a Sunday after the first full moon. Fine. But now in 1500, people are exploring in the Americas, people are exploring in Asia, in India, in Japan.
What if it’s Sunday in one part of the world and Saturday in a different part of the world when the full moon happens? More than that, how are you going to calculate this so that somebody who’s a missionary in Peru can work out when Easter is supposed to be? This was really the big sticking point, because fixing the leap years was pretty easy.
Somebody noticed that if you skipped a leap year every fourth century, you could be back on track. They decided that, let me phrase that differently, if you skip a leap year every century except every fourth century, then you’d be back on track. So they worked this out in the 1500s, right?
1582 is when it was established. 1600 would be a leap year. But 1700, not a leap year.
1800, not a leap year. 1900, not a leap year. 2000, if you remember, was a leap year.
But if we live long enough, we’ll see 2100 was not a leap year. A lot of people don’t realize that the century years are not leap years, the most notorious being Excel spreadsheets, which get anything from before the year 1900 totally wrong. But that’s Microsoft’s problem.
Okay. They fixed that one, and they cut 10 days out of the calendar in October of the year 1582 so that the 4th of October was followed by the 15th of October. That put the calendar back on track.
Everybody was happy with that. Just do it once. Fine.
But how you work out Easter? Eventually, they came up with an arbitrary formula that would fit on one page that any priest who had, you know, basic arithmetic could calculate for themselves that imitated the first Sunday after the first full moon of first day of spring. And it got it right 15 times out of 17 for most of the world.
It’s good enough. As it says in the Bible, we’re not made for the Sabbath. The Sabbath is made for us.
And that arbitrary formula meant that you could calculate the days of Easter as long into the future as you wanted. So when Christopher Clavius, a Jesuit priest who had been part of this commission, wrote up the book explaining the calendar, he also included tables of the date of Easter and all the other religious feasts, the movable feasts that are tied to the date of Easter, and he calculated them up to the year 5000. We’ve got a copy of that book in our library at the Vatican Observatory.
[Andy Poniros]
I am just amazed that a group of people that were actually human computers could figure this all out. I know that we talked about Galileo earlier. I’d like to discuss Galileo and the Catholic Church, if that’s okay.
It certainly was one of the most misunderstood historical accounts.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
I’m actually going to fast forward to the end of the 19th century, which incidentally was when the Vatican Observatory was founded, when the Pope decided we needed to tell people that the Church supported science. Before then, who was doing science? Who could afford to do science?
It takes a lot of time. It takes an education. Most people didn’t have the education or the free time.
The scientists up until the middle of the 19th century were either wealthy noblemen, maybe medical doctors, or clergymen. You can see that by going to the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, the world’s first scientific journal, and just going down the table of contents and see who’s publishing there. That’s who’s publishing.
Scientists were the ones doing the sorting and filing of nature. What do you call sorting and filing? Clerical work.
It’s not surprising that a lot of the scientists were clerics. That’s one of the things they teach you if you’re going to be running a parish, how to keep track of births and deaths. It’s clerical work, but it’s very important.
By the end of the 19th century, there were changes in both science and in politics that conspired to get people to want to find a reason to beat up on the Church and to say, aha, the Church is anti-science. That’s why we can beat up on them. What’s going on?
First of all, 19th century science was very arrogant. They thought they had it all figured out. They thought Newton’s laws were perfect and we’ll never get anything better than them.
We should even close down the patent office because all the good stuff has already been invented. Of course, 20th century, we discovered that Newton’s laws are wildly inaccurate and insufficient to describe great distances or very tiny distances. Quantum theory and general relativity shows us that Newton really is not a good description.
The kind of determinism, if I know Newton’s laws and I know the exact position and I know the exact forces and I know the exact velocity, I can determine exactly what’s going to happen to every atom in your brain and therefore I can predict what you’re going to be thinking five minutes from now. Now, no, it doesn’t work that way for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that the universe is not this deterministic universe that they thought in the 19th century it was. Likewise, the kind of Sunday supplement science, the science that you’d find on cable TV nowadays that seems to have the glib guy with all the answers made it sound like electricity and steam engines were going to solve all of our problems.
It made it sound like good and evil could be solved by, you know, manipulating with chemicals or taking care of people’s glands or whatever. Which is interesting, this is also the time when the murder mystery becomes a genre because logic can work out who the good guy is and who the bad guy is and whodunit. And you’re living in a world that has, you know, nice good guys and nice bad guys and it’s all sorted out.
The one really important development was the theory of evolution, which as a scientific theory is a wonderful description of how things may be behaving in the biological world. But the Sunday supplement people immediately grabbed it and over-interpreted it and tried to apply it to human life. So that survival of the fittest means this kind of plant is going to thrive and the other plant won’t.
Suddenly that’s, ah, I’m rich and you’re poor. That shows that I am more fit than you and it’s only right that I should be rich and you should be poor. Get out of my way if I try to help you out by giving you money.
I’m only going against nature. Well, there’s a lovely philosophy of your really selfish SOB, of which there were a few at the end of the 19th century, maybe still to this day. But then even worse was, ah, I can determine who the unfit are and make sure that, well, it would be wrong to murder them, but let’s just, you know, make sure they don’t breed anymore.
And this idea of eugenics, of determining who the fit people are and who gets to, you know, have kids and who doesn’t have kids, or at the very least, who gets to come into America as an immigrant and who doesn’t. In the 1920s, Congress passes a law that limits immigration so that, you know, my grandfather couldn’t have come to America if he had tried to come in before the 1920s. Asians in general were barred from immigrating into the U.S. up to our lifetime. That law didn’t go away until the 1960s. The Supreme Court approves laws that allow for the sterilization of the unfit. And the U.S. government continued to sponsor the sterilization of people they thought were unfit, oddly enough, all minorities, into the 1970s. The only people who spoke out against this eugenics behavior at that time, in the turn of the century, the turn of the 19th century, was the church. If you look at the Scopes trial, the grand inherit the wind and all the things you’ve heard about, you look at the textbook that Scopes was actually using, and it was a horribly eugenics and racist textbook. It claimed that you could show that some races were superior to others because this was the result of natural selection.
No wonder that church people were opposed to evolution. That’s the evolution they saw presented to them in the Sunday supplements, in their equivalent of cable TV shows. It, of course, did a terrible thing to science.
It made science look horrible. But it also planted in the side of the people who are going to be scientists, all of the churches opposing this obviously true stuff, that they must be anti-scientific and we’ve got to suppress the church, especially the Catholics because they didn’t want that cheap labor from Italy and Eastern Europe coming in. Well, World War II comes along.
You see, eugenics led to its logical conclusion in the death camps of Nazi Germany. And that’s why I say after the war, when I was growing up, science and religion had at least a temporary reconciliation. And so you’re going back to Galileo.
It was at this time, at the end of the 19th century, that the myth of Galileo is reinvented in a couple of books by a fellow named Draper, by a fellow named White. The eternal war between science and Christendom. And they used the church’s opposition to Galileo as proof that the church has always been anti-scientific.
And they always used Galileo because they couldn’t come up with any other example. Of course, the Galileo example is not the church being anti-science. You read the trial, you read the documents in the case, and it was a whole lot more complicated than that.
But it certainly was not saying that studying the physical universe was bad.
[Andy Poniros]
It sounds like it might have been more political than anything.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
Absolutely. Certainly in Italy, it was also political. The unification of Italy came at the expense of territory that the Pope used to rule.
The church was still a very powerful force in the unified Italy. The government was vehemently anti-church because they saw the church’s rivals, and the church was anti-government because they’d lost the territory they used to rule. So, in Italy, they go and invent the myth of Giordano Bruno, as he was burned at the stake for being a scientist.
Well, he was burned at the stake, but he was not a scientist. And, you know, burning people at the stake is a bad thing to do, but it wasn’t because of his science.
[Andy Poniros]
You are listening to Cosmic Perspective Radio. We’re going to continue our discussion with today’s guest, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno. I was going to wait a little later in the broadcast to talk about this, but it seems like an appropriate time now.
Faith and science. At one time in my life, there seemed to be a bridge between faith and science, and even Einstein spoke about God. And then there were times when I thought that there was a wedge between faith and science.
Do you think that wedge between faith and science still exists?
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
The wedge started at the end of the 19th century, and you can certainly see that in the very glib writings of even people who should have known better, like H.G. Wells or Alexander Graham Bell. There was this temporary reprieve in the 50s, in the 60s. It was revived again in the 80s as a political tool.
Again, a way for some politicians to try to use this as a wedge to separate my people which are holy and those other people which are evil. And I hate to be a both-sider, but there are those who would then want to say that, you know, we’re the only ones who really respect science. Which is kind of foolish, incidentally.
Even if somebody is calling their biblical idea of the universe creation science, which is not something I buy into, but they’re using the word science. They still want to know about the physical universe. They’ve got their own way of doing it, but, you know, they still have the same goals and the same desires that we all have.
The interesting thing that I see is there’s this lag between where the intellectual world is and where the rest of the world, the popular world, is. There can be two or three generations before people finally catch on and think, in the 1920s and 30s and 40s and 50s, if you were a Jesuit and you’re a scientist, and you can find this in the writings, you had to defend, you had to justify that, yeah, I’m really a scientist. I’m not just taking things out of the Bible.
I can find this in the writings of a fellow named George Coyne, who was a director of the observatory from the 1970s into about the year 2000. I don’t feel I have to do that anymore, certainly not with my fellow scientists. There has been a change in the scientific world that makes actual scientists today much more open to people of faith.
Part of it is the cultural change that values diversity, and diversity is a newcomer to science. The Pope had the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that Pius XI set up in the 1930s in its current form, and they would sponsor scientific meetings as a way of an outreach to the scientists. So, in the 1950s, the Pontifical Academy has a big meeting at Rome where they invite the great astronomers of the day to discuss the populations of stars.
Why is this population of stars a big deal? Yeah, there’s population one stars, population two stars, who cares? Well, those of us who know astronomy, like maybe the people listening to your podcast here, your radio show, they know that population one stars are chemically different from population two stars, and also different in how old they are.
If stars in the past are chemically, systematically different from stars that are more recently made, it means the universe has evolved. It means the universe is not in steady state. It means that that crazy idea that maybe there was a Big Bang might be true.
So, you’ve got Father George Lemaitre, the inventor of the Big Bang, and you’ve got Fred Hoyle, who was, you know, the proponent of the constant universe, both at this meeting. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about who else is at the meeting.
Who’s who? You know, a fellow named Oort, the Oort cloud, a fellow named Schwarzschild, the son of the famous Schwarzschild. A lot of famous names.
They’re, of course, all white. They’re, of course, all men. They are, of course, all with names that don’t end in vowels.
They’re all northern Europeans. That’s who was doing science in 1957. By the time I’m a grad student in the 1970s, my department at the University of Arizona had 10 students, a brand new department of planetary science.
Of the 10 students, one was a woman. One was non-Christian. One Jew.
One was a guy with a name that ended in a vowel. It was still a very narrow wasp field. White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant.
Today, you look at that same department and less than a quarter of them are, you know, white guys with names that don’t end in vowels. More than half of them are women. There is this diversity in science, which has made the science much richer because, you know, if you’re trying to get the best brains and you’re eliminating half of them immediately because they’re women and you’re eliminating another huge fraction because they’re not the right race, then you’re not going to get the smartest people in the world.
But this means that diversity is valued. So that when I show up to a meeting, people will say, oh, I’ve got this friend who’s a Jesuit. Isn’t that cool?
And I’ve got that friend over there who’s a Hindu. And isn’t that wonderful? And I’ve got this other friend who’s a Buddhist.
And isn’t that wonderful? In addition, the weird thing that happened when I became a Jesuit, you know, I’ve been a scientist for 20 years at that point. This is 1990.
And I’m thinking, what are my friends going to think? You know, I’ve come out of the closet as a churchgoer. What am I, gosh, what are they going to believe?
What happened was, over and over and over again, people came up and said, so you go to church? Let me tell you about the church I go to. And I’m going, you go to church, too?
We never knew. We were in a culture where it seemed to be the kind of thing you don’t talk about. And me, I’m more likely to know if somebody was gay than if somebody was a churchgoer.
It’s become something that you could be more open with now, and that people are much more willing to talk about. It’s a generational change. Not all to the good.
Because it means that on the other hand, they don’t take religion as seriously anymore. So the religion you believe or don’t believe is like the same as, you know, what brand of coffee you drink. So it’s good and bad.
But certainly, that acceptance of faith in science, that message that we really are not at war, is slowly percolating into the general public. I think the issues that we will be having to face in the next 50 years, in terms of how faith and reason, faith and science, religion and science interact, will continue to be challenging. But it’ll be a different challenge.
And what the direction is going to be? I’m not sure I could guess.
[Andy Poniros]
That’s very interesting. I have a daughter that received her PhD in science of anthropology a few years ago. After interviewing Vera Rubin, knowing the barriers that she had to overcome, even with the difficulties that women and some cultures have today, it seems that these barriers have been being overcome in the field of science.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
I have to say it varies from science to science. The place where I think there’s the most openness is the more esoteric parts of physics, and cosmology, and astronomy in general, because we are used to living in a world that is more than mechanistic, you know, Newtonian physics. The last bastion of the old attitudes tends to be among the biologists, because they’re still trying to figure out the gears and levers of what goes on inside a cell.
And their mindset is still, you know, in that sense, pretty much a 19th century mindset. And yet even there, you find an awful lot of people who at least will accept that they don’t know. There was a scientist friend of mine who had been a grad student at Carl Sagan’s.
And Sagan, you hold up as sort of that old generation, I don’t believe in that religion stuff kind of guy. That’s not what he was like at the end of his life. And he even said to her at one point, an atheist is somebody who knows more than I do.
Because they realize that atheism is itself as unprovable as any belief system. These are not proofs. These are the axioms.
This is what we start with. And then we try to make sense of the world with these axioms. And even Neil deGrasse Tyson has somebody who, again, you know, is not deeply religious by any means, but has great respect for religion has gone out of his way to make that point.
[Andy Poniros]
That’s very interesting. I didn’t know that about Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan. But for me, I find this very hard to believe that everything has to be a mistake.
That means that everything we touch and everything we see is a mistake. And I find that really hard to believe. And then we talk about the Earth, you know, not being a very special place.
There are trillions of galaxies, billions of stars in each galaxy. Almost every star we looked at have planets revolving around them from land-based telescopes to space telescopes. We found 6,000 or more at this time.
Not one planetary system resembles our own solar system. And then everybody gets excited when we see an Earth-like planet. They say, oh, we found an Earth-like planet.
It’s revolving around this star. It’s in the Goldilocks zone. What does that mean?
That means that there could be life there and then maybe there could be beings there like us. And then we find out that this planet is revolving around a star that’s not like our star at all. It’s much dimmer than our stars.
And these planets are locked in their orbits. And one side of the planet is facing this star all the time and is warm and Goldilocks-y. And the other side is frozen, dark on one side, light on the other all the time.
These planets don’t resemble the Earth at all. And so out of the billions, I should say out of the trillions of galaxies, with billions of stars, with multiple planets revolving around them in the universe, maybe the Earth is this special place.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
Maybe we are very special. I’m reminded of the old Pogo cartoon. You and I are old enough to remember Pogo, the great cartoonist DeWalt Kelly of the 1950s.
And at one point, he has two of his characters. The porcupine is the philosopher. And he says to Pogo, you know, some scientists out there are saying that there are creatures in the universe more intelligent than human beings.
And others say that in the whole universe, we’re the most intelligent. Either way, it’s a sobering thought. That is a sobering thought.
[Andy Poniros]
But then we’ve got flat earthers. What’s your take on that?
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
Well, people want to see themselves as special. Without recognizing the fact they are special, but special in ways that, oh, it feels commonplace. I want to be smarter than the other guys in the room.
If your identity is that you’re the smartest guy in the room, then you can’t possibly agree with everybody else in the room. So you’ve got to have some way of saying I’m clever because it’s so sad because that’s not what makes you clever. That’s not what makes you smart.
I was very privileged the way I grew up. First of all, you know, white male in suburban Detroit back in the days when that was a booming town. I was not the smartest kid in my grade school.
I was by no means the smartest kid in my high school. And then I went to MIT where heaven forbid, I was absolutely not the smartest kid at MIT. I never had that expectation that I had to be the smartest guy in the class.
Not only that, I knew enough smart people to know that smart isn’t a linear scale. There’s no such thing as the smartest kid in the class, because everybody’s got their own variation and set of abilities that I don’t have. About 15 years ago, I had a semester where I taught at Le Moyne College, lovely little Jesuit college, the kind that I’d hoped I’d be able to teach at.
It’s in Syracuse. Most of the students there are going to be pre-professionals and maybe the first in their class to go to college. And they’re very different from the kinds of students I was among when I was at MIT or even when I was teaching when I was a postdoc there.
So they don’t have the horsepower that an MIT student is going to have. One day, I’m in the class and one of the kids is giving a class presentation. So I’m sitting in her desk, she’s up presenting to the class.
And she makes a reference, which I thought was very clever, between some of the origin of the universe things that we are talking about, and Aristotle’s philosophy. She mentions Aristotle. The student next to me gives off this really loud groan, and then rolls her eyes.
And I’m thinking, how rude. The student on the other side of her leaps out of his desk, grabs her, lays her on the ground. Another student has the cell phone out calling the campus police.
Somebody has just had a seizure. We are in this class at this point. Here are the symptoms.
Within five minutes, the campus police were there with a medical team. I’m going, these students were all being trained to be medical technicians, to be other kinds of technicians. They were aware of stuff that I was totally unaware of.
And I realized if that had happened in a classroom at MIT, that poor student would be dead. And none of the MIT students would have known even that anything had happened, much less what to do about it. You tell me who’s more intelligent.
So you know, so to speak.
[Andy Poniros]
Being in a field that I was in for 50 years, repairing x-ray and medical equipment, I kept telling people, the people that I worked for, you know, you really should get somebody, a young guy in here, a young woman, someone that I could train. I got all this stuff in my head. I want to get it over to somebody else.
And fortunately, for the last three years, they did. A young guy, perfect for understanding and learning. But the first thing I said to him is, well, I’m going to teach you all the mistakes I made.
You’re going to make mistakes, but then you don’t have to make the mistakes I already made over the last 50 years. And that’s what it comes down to. Yeah.
And I love to see this with science as well. Like you say, at this point, we’re sharing information. I hope someday that even China is, you know, in this space race, we’re able to work with them instead of against them or not with them.
And, you know, whenever astronauts go into space, they when they look at the Earth, they don’t see any borders. Right. So yes, there’s one place.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
There’s an interesting thing that we get to do at the Vatican. We’re free from a lot of that politics. There’s a project, I won’t even go into the details of, that an observatory in China, which incidentally had been founded by the Jesuits in the 19th century, but you know, still a thriving observatory, had a project that needs cooperation with Harvard College Observatory.
Because of the political state between the two countries, it’s very difficult for them to collaborate, but they can collaborate both of them with the Vatican. That’s one of the lovely ways that the Vatican Observatory can contribute to being a bridge between not just faith and science, but between one side of the political spectrum and the other. You remember the year 2009, the year of astronomy, which was a fabulous event.
And the theme that they used, that they settled on, which I think I still love, we all live under the same sky. We have been able to collaborate with scientists from Iran, scientists from China, scientists from the Soviet Union, where the former Soviet Union, Russia now, scientists from South America. We’ve got a summary school where we bring in kids from all over the world.
The most recent summary school is going to be in 2025 this summer. We’ve just chosen the 25 students out of nearly 200 who applied. My gosh, there are some good students there.
They come from 21 different countries, and countries that nominally are enemies of each other. And yet, we’re not enemies because we’re all astronomers. We’re all working together.
[Andy Poniros]
That’s wonderful. Yeah, it’s good to finally see that we are more that way than we’ve been maybe in a long, long time.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
Yeah. And certainly, astronomy is a place where it can happen. In part, because I don’t think you can make any money at it.
[Andy Poniros]
Yeah. And I think the thing is that, like you say, whoever’s interested in it has a passion for it. You said that the vows that you made about poverty, but you know, I could have no money in my pockets to feel like a millionaire when I do a little bit of public outreach.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
Even just when you look at a nebula through your little telescope, or if you don’t have a little telescope, just looking at the stars. Every night living in Tucson, I’m able to walk from where we have dinner with our Jesuit community to the building where I live. It’s two minutes outdoors.
And I savor those two minutes to go out and look at the stars. And just to be reminded once again, that the universe is bigger than me, and whatever it is that’s upsetting me at the moment.
[Andy Poniros]
I know we’re getting a little short on time. And I appreciate you taking the time out to be with us today. Is there anything else that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t discussed?
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
Well, I would like to talk a bit about the foundation that we have that supports our work. It’s called the Vatican Observatory Foundation. And you can find it online VaticanObservatory.org.
You’ll find wonderful photographs that we’ve taken with our telescope here in Arizona, which is where I’m speaking from today. A lot of the other work that we do, of course, we’re fundraising, that summer school doesn’t come for free, we have to raise money for that. But even beyond that, we’ve got a website with more than 500 articles, PDFs, videos, whatever, about faith and science.
If people want to explore in greater depth, you know, the Galileo story, or in greater depth, the origin of the universe and what people think about that, or extraterrestrials, and you know, really, what’s the evidence for and against? What does it all mean? How do we go about looking for this stuff?
All of these things can be found on our website. And I’d love people to just get to know again, something of our history. Because it’s where we get to celebrate who we’ve been for the last 130 years, since 1891, when the observatory was founded.
And to share with the world, as you say, when you’re in love, you got to tell everybody.
[Andy Poniros]
Yes, indeed. Brother Guy, can you tell our listeners that website link again, in case they didn’t get it?
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
www.vaticanobservatory.org. Easy enough.
[Andy Poniros]
Brother Guy, I appreciate you taking the time for this informal chat about science and faith and history as well. I don’t get the chance to do something like this very often, so I appreciate it. Thanks for being with us today.
[Brother Guy Consolmagno]
It’s fun to be here. It’s fun to share the stuff we both love. It is.
Thanks again. Thank you.
[Andy Poniros]
Cosmic Perspective is an Andy Pinero’s production. Thanks for listening to this 365 Days of Astronomy podcast.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post production by me, Richard Drumm, project management by Avivah Yamani, and hosting donated by libsyn.com. This content is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free.
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Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity!