Vatican astronomer speaks at library

Father Guy Consolmagno
Brother Guy Consolmagno

By Christopher Graney, Special to The Record
Six hundred people gathered at the Louisville Free Public Library Dec. 9 to hear from astronomers representing two different centuries.

One was Dr. Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit Brother who Pope Francis recently appointed to be director of the Vatican Observatory.

The other was Tony Dingman, a Frazier History Museum teaching artist, who portrayed Kentucky-born astronomer Ormsby Mitchel.

Mitchel founded the Cincinnati Observatory and was a general in the Union Army in the Civil War. Both Brother Consolmagno and Mitchel have been compared to Carl Sagan for their ability to communicate science to the public.

Dingman spoke first, representing Mitchel, and described the vast scale of the universe in a speech closely based on one the astronomer gave in 1847. Dingman noted that the vast universe was comprehensible by humans as being governed by laws we can understand.

Of the universe and its laws he stated, “God has given us these works for our examination, and he has given us this intellect by which we are enabled to comprehend their structures; and it is by this that we are able to rise — to climb — to soar, by our own efforts and by his aid.”

Brother Consolmagno spoke about the Vatican Observatory and the nature of science, focusing on ideas from the history of astronomy that were “almost correct”— ideas that ranged from the relationship between comets and meteor showers to the nature of the moons of Jupiter.

“Sometimes,” he said, “science makes its most significant progress when it’s almost correct — which is to say, when it’s wrong.”

The Jesuit also took a number of questions from audience members. He served on the committee that decided Pluto should no longer be classified as a planet, and one person asked him if, based on new information about Pluto from the spacecraft that recently visited it, “Would you change your mind?”

Brother Consolmagno answered, “No,” to many chuckles from the audience. He went on to explain that Pluto never was a good fit as a planet, and that it is now properly grouped with other bodies like it. Pluto is not an ugly duckling planet but “a beautiful swan of its type of object,” he said.

Another person asked, “How do you rectify the book of Genesis and all the scientific knowledge that you’ve learned and know?”

Brother Consolmagno responded that he learned science from textbooks that are now all obsolete (he is in his 60s).

“No one would use the biology book that their parents used in a biology class,” he noted. “Science books go obsolete because science is always, by its nature, ‘almost correct.’ … Genesis is not a science book … I don’t throw Genesis away, any more than I would throw away Plato or Shakespeare.”

He then went on to say that Genesis is about God and will still be valid a thousand years from now, when current scientific theories, such as the Big Bang theory, have long been superseded by better science.

Throughout his talk and the question, Brother Consolmagno was regularly interrupted by laughter and applause from the audience.

The program, “Beneath the Same Sky: A Vatican Astronomer and a Civil War General Speak to Louisville about the Heavens,” was a collaboration between the Louisville chapter of Sigma Xi (a 125-year-old scientific research society), Jefferson Community and Technical College, the Frazier History Museum and the Louisville Free Public Library.

Christopher M. Graney is a professor of Physics at the Jefferson Community and Technical College.

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One reply on “Vatican astronomer speaks at library”
  1. says: Harold M. Frost, III, Ph.D.

    Thank you, Prof. Graney, for your December 21, 2105 blog, “Vatican astronomer speaks at library.” I am a retired research physicist with a point of view that seems contrary to the “Almost correct” theme featured in your blog of Bro. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory. That is, research papers published a century or more ago can hide ideas valuable for discovering new knowledge today. For example, notions and data published in the early 1900’s and even late 1800’s were useful in my recent research into theories for both light and sound waves in solids under stress and behavior of nuclei in solids moving in magnetic fields. One of the five papers that Albert Einstein published in German in his “miracle year” of 1905 on special relativity provides an example. One value in so going back to the past is to develop a broad perspective and heuristic that helps a formed exploratory researcher to integrate knowledge and thus build an intellectual scaffolding on which to not only ‘hang’ new ideas but also provide them with logical credibility because of their structural connectivity with accepted principles and laws of physics. Another value accrues to young students who in their STEM educational process have to start with those selfsame simple – even “almost correct” — ideas of the scientists of centuries past. Some of today’s young students will become tomorrow’s shatterers of accepted canons of physical truth, ideational iconoclasts who will further our knowledge of the physical universe because they will have also reached back to the past (which is our today) as well as inform themselves of the scientific literature current in their own day (which is our future).

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