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Christopher M. Graney

About Christopher M. Graney

Christopher M. Graney is an Adjunct Scholar at the Vatican Observatory. For some years now his research focus has been the history of astronomy, especially the late 16th and early 17th centuries. That research has resulted in two books: Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science Against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo (2015), and Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo (2017), both published by the University of Notre Dame Press. Graney is also editor of the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science pages.

Astronomy in Art & Architecture: Look Down and see the Sky

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Sometimes you find the night sky where you least expect it. When I began writing for Sacred Space Astronomy / The Catholic Astronomer I started keeping an eye out for examples of astronomy in art and architecture. Those examples have been far less common than I would have guessed. So I was pleasantly surprised to find the sun, moon, and stars all represented in art—all in the sink of a Mexican restaurant! Who expects to look down into a sink and find the sky there? The answer to that question might be “more people than you think, Graney”, because a few months after seeing the sink pictured above, I ran into another sky sink, pictured below. This was at a different Mexican restaurant (yes, I am a big fan of Mexican restaurants). The artists who created these sinks did not aim for a “realistic” depiction of celestial bodies. In particular, the first sink shown here has little crescent shapes with … Continue reading →

The Origin of the Origin of Life

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Have you ever heard a scientific explanation for the origin of life? Carl Sagan discussed this in his famous “Cosmos” TV show, during the second episode, “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue”: Now, let’s take a closer look at who our ancestors were. A simple chemical circumstance led to one of the great moments in the history of our planet. There were many kinds of molecules in the primordial soup. Some were attracted to water on one side and repelled by it on the other. This drove them together into a tiny enclosed spherical shell like a soap bubble, which protected the interior. Within the bubble, the ancestors of DNA found a home and the first cell arose. Sagan’s discussion remains current. You can find a more recent short video discussion of the origin of life by typing “origin of life” into a Google video search. You will get results something like what is seen below. The short videos consist … Continue reading →

Talking to Your Dog… or to E.T.

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This post comes from a “Science in the Bluegrass” column I wrote for The Record, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville, Kentucky.  That column in turn came from a series of posts I wrote for Sacred Space Astronomy in early 2018, so if you have been reading this blog for a while, you will recognize the general idea here.   Extraterrestrials! They are an idea from science whose impact on popular culture has been huge. Think of those big movie franchises that involve beings from other worlds: Marvel, Star Wars, Star Trek, and more. Extraterrestrials have not always been popular. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher from before Christ, reasoned that Earth is the only world that exists. No other worlds. No extraterrestrials. Aristotle influenced many Greco-Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers. However, in 1277, the bishop of Paris officially condemned Aristotle’s idea that Earth could be the only world. An omnipotent God, the bishop said, could make any number … Continue reading →

Something Different! The Origin of Astronomy, 1714

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A few weeks ago I ran a post here at Sacred Space Astronomy involving Thomas Creech’s 1714 translation into English Verse of Lucretius’s Of the Nature of Things. Creech’s book is pretty interesting. Along with its translation of Lucretius’s poem, it has lots of notes and commentary. And part of that commentary is a long discussion on the origins of astronomy. The author of the commentary (who is not Creech) attributes the origins of astronomy to Adam and his son Seth: Adam was divinely infused with astronomical knowledge; he taught Seth, and it passed on down through Enoch and Noah and Abraham. I find this author’s presentation fascinating. I have seen passing references in history of science scholarship to “Adamic science”—the idea that God infused Adam with bucketloads of knowledge, knowledge that eroded away with the passage of time, so that an astronomer (or pretty much any other person involved in the arts or sciences) was always trying to recapture … Continue reading →

This Thing All Things Devours

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Things change. This is obvious. Sometimes change is seen in terms of progress—things are built up, invented, improved, developed. However, oftentimes change means decay. From a science perspective, all change means decay. According to the famous “Second Law of Thermodynamics”, nature tends towards disorder. A fresh deck of cards goes from order (all cards arranged by number and suit) to disorder with just a few shuffles; additional shuffling never puts the deck back in order. A box in which red and green marbles have been arrayed in an orderly fashion will be thrown into disarray if shaken or otherwise disturbed; additional shaking never puts the marbles back in order. Similarly, a drop of food coloring disperses into a cup of vinegar water for dyeing Easter eggs; it never reforms into a drop. An ice cube melts into a glass of tea, and never reforms into a cube. To counter this tendency toward disorder requires energy, and the use of energy … Continue reading →

St. Julian of the Crater

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Right near the point where Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia all come together stands a Catholic church in an asteroid impact crater. The church is St. Julian in Middlesboro, Kentucky. In fact, the entire town of Middlesboro sits in the crater. For most of St. Julian’s history, no one realized that it stood within a crater. The church was built in 1892, as Middlesboro itself was being built. Middlesboro sits right below the Cumberland Gap, on the United States’ old “Wilderness Road”. As the 18th century turned into the 19th, hundreds of thousands of settlers from the original 13 states of the U.S. followed that road, migrating to what is now Kentucky. Middlesboro itself came into existence much later, however, when an English coal baron invested heavily in the area. The Middlesboro basin was a good place to put a town that was to be built around a mining economy. According to the Kentucky Geological Survey, it was not until geologists … Continue reading →

Life, Lucretius, and Leeuwenhoek

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Where does life come from? Genesis describes life being created by God, who instructs living things to “be fertile and multiply” and fill the seas and land (Gen. 1:22, 28). But for much of history, scientists thought life came from the Earth itself. This idea was ancient, going back to at least Aristotle 2500 years ago. This theory of “spontaneous generation” (which has been featured in this blog before) said that matter possesses life-generating force. Small creatures could be spontaneously generated from dirt. Indeed, people claimed to see frogs forming from mud. The ancient Roman writer Pliny described this idea: Aelianus said, that as he travelled in Italy near Naples, he saw many different frogs by the road, whose fore-parts and head did move and creep, but whose hind-parts were formed and like to the slime of the Earth. This caused the poet Ovid to write thus: Dirt has his seed engendering frogs full green, Yet so as feetless and … Continue reading →

Where to Turn? Religion, science, and the direction of Mecca

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There is a great new entry in the Vatican Observatory Faith & Science pages (or so say I, but since I am the editor of that resource, I am rather biased). The entry is called “The Qibla Debate”. “Faith and science” discussions tend to focus on a certain selection of very familiar materials, such as Darwin and evolution and human origins, or the Galileo story, or maybe Giordano Bruno. “The Qibla Debate” features a faith and science discussion that revolves around material with which most people in non-Muslim cultures will be unfamiliar: the direction of Mecca. What is the direction of Mecca from where you are right now? Muslims are enjoined to face Mecca during daily prayers. Mosques should be oriented toward Mecca also. So what direction is that, and how do you know? Early mosques were built before the Islamic world had developed much science. Their directions were not determined scientifically. And, as science developed in the Muslim world, … Continue reading →

More Serious Sirius Business

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My post last week was about brilliant Sirius, which turns out to be a double star, comprised of a much brighter Sirius A, and a faint Sirius B.  We saw how the motions of these stars, seen in the video below, told us that the Sirius system was 8.6 light years away, and had 20+ times the sun’s luminosity.  The motion of Sirius B orbiting around Sirius A takes 50 years to complete.  The video below shows a little more than two complete orbits of Sirius B about Sirius A, from approximately 2020 to approximately 2154.  The video is a simulation, and presents what you would see if you had a very good telescope aimed at the exact same point in the sky for all that time. If the telescope is instead aimed at Sirius A, then the motion of Sirius B becomes a textbook case of an orbit—Kepler’s laws of orbital motion in action, as can be seen in … Continue reading →

A Serious Sirius Business

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The brightest star* in the sky, Sirius, the Dog Star, was the subject of a nice, short article in the March 2020 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.  The article noted that Sirius is a double star: the Sirius that we point to in the night sky (what astronomers call “Sirius A”) is orbited by a faint companion star (“Sirius B”).  Sirius B is most difficult to see through a telescope, owing to the brightness of Sirius A—but it can be spotted, and even photographed. The motion of Sirius B around Sirius A can also be spotted.  Observe Sirius with a good telescope over a period of 50 years and you will see Sirius B complete one orbit.  The video below shows a little more than two complete orbits of Sirius B about Sirius A, from approximately 2020 to approximately 2154.  This video is a simulation made with the app Celestia.  It shows what you would see if you had … Continue reading →

The Summer Stars Speak

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This post is based on a series of four posts that originally appeared here in July of 2016. My posts for the next two weeks will be on the science of learning about the stars through “double stars”, so this is good material to “re-run”. Look up at the summer night sky. You see stars, of course. There are bright stars like Vega and Arcturus, middling stars like Polaris (the North Star) and Mizar (the star in the “bend” of the Big Dipper’s handle), and faint stars like Rho Leo (an unremarkable star in the constellation of Leo, the lion) and Alcor (the dim companion of Mizar). When we look at these stars, what are we seeing? How do we know what the stars are? You have probably heard that the sun is a star, but are all these stars suns? I have previously discussed in this blog how a person with excellent vision will see stars as small, round … Continue reading →

Vatican Observatory Photometry and “The Vilnius Connection”

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“Forty Years of Photometry.” That is what is on the cover of the Specola Vaticana/Vatican Observatory’s 2019 Annual Report. If you have not had a look at the report, click here and read through it (and to see Annual Reports going back years, click here). The two gentlemen on the cover are Fr. Richard P. Boyle, S.J. (at right) and Fr. Robert Janusz, S.J. And that cover, and those gentlemen, have a connection to my “origins story” with this Sacred Space Astronomy blog and the V.O. The Annual Report’s main article starts off by noting that, Just as this year the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, so here at the Specola we mark a significant anniversary: 40 years since the pioneering publication of Father Martin McCarthy and his collaborators on stellar photometry, which laid the groundwork for what has become a major thrust of research at the Vatican Observatory. In that paper, Fr. McCarthy described … Continue reading →