Category Archives: Across the Universe

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Across the Universe: An extraordinary, ordinary man

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This entry is part 180 of 182 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in March 2018 When the news agency of the Italian Bishops’ Conference asked me, as Vatican Observatory director, for a statement on the death of Stephen Hawking, I wrote: “Stephen Hawking… was a scientist of remarkable insight who even more remarkably gave a human face to the work of astronomical cosmology.”  The bishops translated my English into Italian, and issued a press release. That release was, in turn, picked up by American newspapers who turned their Italian back into English. Thus the Washington Post had me saying that Hawking was a “scientist of admirable intuition, who knew even more extraordinarily to give a human face to cosmology and to astronomy.” It’s close; but it’s not quite what I said.  This story illustrates a fundamental difficulty we always must face when trying to put human language, be it Italian or English or mathematics, to the task of describing the universe. We will always be … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Stories of the Belt

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This entry is part 1 of 182 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in February 2018 January 31 [2018] marked the sixtieth anniversary of the launch of Explorer 1, the first American spacecraft to orbit the Earth. I was five years old; it affected my dreams and aspirations, not to mention my education in science, over the next twenty years. As the story goes, the American rocket and satellite was thrown together in 90 days to answer the launch of Russia’s Sputnik satellite the previous October… and the disaster of our Vanguard rocket, which had blown up on the launch pad. It most notable achievement was the discovery of the Van Allen Belts. Twenty years later, Dr. James Van Allen spoke at my graduate class in space sciences. I recall him describing how he chose to put a Geiger counter into the Explorer satellite because it was cheap, off the shelf, and provided data that was easy to radio back to Earth. They hoped to detect ionized gas … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Looking overhead

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This entry is part 183 of 182 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in January 2018 “What do you see when you look at the stars? Science, heaven, God?” the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire asked me in 2018. Does the sky look any different to a professional astronomer who is also a person of faith? The first thing I see when I look up at night is the beauty of the stars… just like anyone who can see the night sky.  But I do see more. My father, a US Army Air Corps navigator who once guided a wing of American bombers across the Atlantic to England in 1942, taught me the brighter navigation stars when I was a child. I’d also been given a wonderful book by the children’s writer H. A. Rey (better known for Curious George) that taught the constellations by turning the stars into connect-the-dot puzzles. Even today, whenever I see the stars I immediately start to identify old friends by name. … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Kings and Toys

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This entry is part 2 of 182 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in December 2016 The day after the feast of St. Nicholas, I arrived in the Netherlands for a series of faith and science talks. My hosts put me up in a marvelously trendy hotel, featuring an exercise machine and a bathtub in the bedroom (no artificial walls between bed and bath!); two televisions (one for the bed, one for the bath); and a coffee machine so complicated I had to look up the instructions on the internet. If only it had a drawer to store my clothes, or a rack for my wet towel. This proliferation of useless toys brought to mind [the 2016] Pontifical Academy of Sciences program on sustainability. For several days we heard from a series of Nobel laureates the latest word on rising carbon dioxide levels, and the need for immediate strong government action. The final day was centered on the hope that genetically modified foods might improve the … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Lights all askew in the heavens…

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This entry is part 3 of 182 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in December 2015 One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein published his theory of General Relativity and changed the way we understand our universe. Newton had shown, 200 years earlier, that one could use mathematics (including his newly invented Calculus) to describe and even predict the way things in our physical universe move. But to do that, Newton had had to assume without definition the concepts of space, mass, and time. He had to assume that forces like gravity acted “at a distance”… Earth could pull on the Moon even if there’s nothing but this mystical “gravity” connecting them. Finally, he had to envision a playing field, the “inertial frame of reference”, where these forces could move those masses through space, over time. The whole genius of physics is to describe motion and change; but change, relative to what? Newton’s unmoving frame of reference was his answer. But was the Earth’s surface such a … Continue reading →