Category Archives: And Then I Wrote

ⓜ Curiosity and the Exploration of Mars, II

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This entry is part of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… this is the second half of the article I started last week, originally published in Italian in Civiltà Cattolica; this is the original English text. While much has developed since this article was written — see the links inserted here — I think the questions I raised then are still valid, and it’s also fun to see what we were thinking about Mars, almost ten years ago… The confluence of this “Mars life” rock [in 1996] and the popular Pathfinder mission [in 1997] gave both a scientific and political motivation to begin a systematic search for life on Mars. Unlike the previous Viking missions, however, this new program would proceed in a series of smaller steps. Viking’s major mistake had been that its design assumed too much about the sort of life it expected to find and the environment where it expected to find it. It was, in essence, a robot designed to find terrestrial life on Earth; it … Continue reading →

ⓜ Curiosity and the Exploration of Mars, I

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This entry is part 1 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… On January 12, 2021, the NASA Mars rover Curiosity marked 3000 Martian days on the surface of Mars. In 2012 I was invited to write an article about the exploration of Mars; “Curiosity e l’esplorazione di Marte” appeared in the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica on November 17,2012. Here is the original English version that I submitted to them. As it is more than 5000 words long, I will publish it over two weeks. One cannot make an observation of anything in nature without, in some way, altering the very object we are trying to observe. In quantum physics, we know that if we shine even the tiniest bit of light, a massless photon, onto a particle to determine its position or momentum, the impact of that photon will nudge the particle into a different position with a changed momentum. What we thought we were observing will have become changed by the very fact of us looking at … Continue reading →

ⓜ The Bookfoxes Interview (Part II)

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This entry is part 54 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… ten years ago there was an active blog site (which I can no longer find online) edited in Britain called “Book Foxes” where a number of writers wrote about books and the people who wrote books. Kirsty Jane Falconer, a British author who has gone on to become a successful freelancer living in Italy, decided to interview me about my book God’s Mechanics for the site. The interview was split into two parts; last week I ran Part I The idea of a religious university as they exist in the US is not a familiar one for those of us in the UK, although of course our university system has deep confessional roots.  Could you tell us something about the idea – and the practice – of a Jesuit university? The Jesuits got into the education business pretty much by accident. They started out as a group of men who’d met at the University of Paris, who … Continue reading →

ⓜ The Bookfoxes Interview (Part I)

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This entry is part 2 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… ten years ago there was an active blog site (which I can no longer find online) edited in Britain called “Book Foxes” where a number of writers wrote about books and the people who wrote books. This was soon after I had published my book God’s Mechanics, which in my opinion of all my books has the highest “quality to readership ratio” — in other words, I think it is really good, but hardly anyone ever saw it. Kirsty Jane Falconer, a British author who has gone on to become a successful freelancer living in Italy, decided to interview me about that book for the site. The interview was split into two parts, which is also how I will run it here. Since I don’t have access anymore to how it appeared online, what follows is the version that I submitted to her. Which question do you most often hear when you do science outreach? “Would you … Continue reading →

Merry Christmas Cards!

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This entry is part 53 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote…  There was a joke when I was growing up in Michigan, that the state’s Secretary of State had one job, to choose the color of the license plates; and every year he blew it! Well, one of the jobs I get as director of the Observatory is choosing the picture and text for our Christmas Cards every year. And, yes, people complain! I thought I would share some cards from Years Past… The “rules” for the card are simple. It has to have a nice photo from the Observatory itself, and a text in both English and Italian that relates both to astronomy and to the season. Antonio Coretti, our IT guru and designer in Rome, puts the cards together and then sends them off to the Vatican press to be printed. Alas, not this year; finances are tight and so we couldn’t afford to print or mail cards. Instead, we prepared an electronic version. In … Continue reading →

ⓜ Pope Benedict and the astronomers…

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This entry is part 16 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… On occasion I’ve quoted various posts I had up at my long-departed LiveJournal site. This one, from December, 2008, features not only such a post but the English version of an article that eventually was published in Italian in L’Osservatore Romano At his weekly “Angelus” prayer and public address at noon on Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI had a nice call out to us astronomers. I haven’t seen an official English translation yet, but here’s my translation of his comments. …This mystery of salvation has a cosmic dimension: Christ is the Sun which, with its light, “transfigures and illuminates the universe in waiting.” The setting of the feast of Christmas is tied to the winter solstice, when the days in the northern hemisphere begin to get longer. And incidentally, perhaps not everyone realizes that St. Peter’s Square is also a meridian: the great Obelisk throws its shadow along a line that runs across the pavement up to the … Continue reading →

ⓜ Cosmology and Expertise

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This entry is part 52 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… this piece I prepared for the golden days of Live Journal, back in 2012, but I think I might have been afraid to post it there. Nowadays, I am not so picky… A couple of years ago, a Jesuit I know who sits on the board of the Catholic Encyclopedia suggested my name to them as someone who could write a couple of articles for them… a thousand words on Astronomy. Another thousand on Cosmology. And another, on “The Big Bang”. The fact is, of course, that I am not an expert on any of these topics. But an introductory article? Only a thousand words? Come on… not only did it look to be easy, it was just the sort of challenge I can’t resist. I will write a thousand words on any topic, at the drop of a hat.  For the level they were looking for, I was confident (justified or not) that I could … Continue reading →

ⓜ Faith and the Cosmos III

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This entry is part 3 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… the conclusion of my mystery article (where did it get published?) about cosmology and how what we think about the universe shapes the way we study it… Newton’s  immense deterministic system seemed unshakeable. And the only role left for God in such a system is to set the initial conditions, to be (in the Aristotelean sense) the “Prime Mover,” the Great Watchmaker who perhaps built the watch, wound it up, and set it running in its inexorable course.  What is a “Rational” Explanation? Beyond the obvious fallacies of such a system in the light of contemporary physics (according  to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the “exact knowledge” of a particle’s position and momentum, for example, is meaningless because they cannot both be determined at the same time), there was a more subtle problem with this cosmology. It insisted that every unexplainable experience must have a “rational” explanation, where “rational” was quickly limited in practice to mean the common … Continue reading →

ⓜ Faith and the Cosmos II

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This entry is part 4 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… part II of an article that dates from 2011 but I have no idea where it ever got published… The Physical and the Spiritual: Even after the adoption of a cosmology based on a spherical earth, a common feature of most cosmologies was the belief that the physical universe mirrored the spiritual realm.  This often involved positing a “chain of creation” in which different levels or aspects of the physical universe were assigned to different elements, different gods, or different ranks of angels. Those different ranks were given names (thrones, dominions) and are what St. Paul was referring to in his letters, cited above. By the Middle Ages, it was assumed that the home of the saints and the biblical firmament were the outer spheres of the universe; below them were the spheres of each planet, moved by angels, and their perfect eternal circular motions stood in contrast to the irregular and finite movements of objects on … Continue reading →

ⓜ Faith and the Cosmos: I

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This entry is part 5 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… So, this is an odd article; not in that it’s unusual, itself — it is typical of the stuff I have written about faith and astronomy. In fact, it’s a nice summary of my ideas. What is odd is that, though I find three or four different versions of this in my files for “stuff I wrote in 2011” and I can see that it was edited (by someone named “Mike”) I have no record of where it was actually published. If anyone reading this can find it in print anywhere, that would be great! I don’t always remember to update my CV with non-science publications. Anyway, what I do see it that it originally was written in the fall of 2011… and the version I am publishing here is actually more or less my original draft, which I think is the freshest if not the most polished version. As with earlier articles that I have published here, this whole … Continue reading →

The Virtuous Astronomer, Part III

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This entry is part 6 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… as I mentioned the last two weeks, this article is adapted from a piece published in Italian in Civiltà Cattolica, which they ran in 2012. But I wrote it in English andI’m not sure the original English ever ran anywhere… because it runs to nearly 6,000 words, I have split it into three parts. The first two parst ran the last two weeks; here’s the finale, Part III, and I’ve decided not to hide it behind a firewall this time.. In order to do science, you must believe that science is worth doing. Which goes to the heart of the question: why do we do it? Do we study the stars to gain power or money or security by predicting the future, the way the astrologers try to do? To improve the timing of growing crops, the way the calendar-makers of the ancient world did? But our calendars don’t need constant revision; and our science has shown that astrology … Continue reading →

ⓜ The Virtuous Astronomer, Part II

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This entry is part 7 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… as I mentioned last week, this article is adapted from a piece published in Italian in Civiltà Cattolica, which they ran in 2012. But I wrote it in English andI’m not sure the original English ever ran anywhere… because it runs to nearly 6,000 words, I have split it into three parts. The first part ran here last week; here’s Part II. In order to do science, you must accept the three virtues described in St. Paul: faith, hope, and love. And these are quite frankly religious in nature. Indeed, one can argue (as Stanley Jaki has done) that they are specifically Christian. Certainly, they are articles that not all religions necessarily believe.  We start with faith. St. Anselm famously described theology as “faith seeking understanding.” But what is faith, really? And how does it relate to science? Well, if theology means faith is seeking understanding, then clearly faith is something that is not yet understood, at least … Continue reading →