Lunar Eavesdropping: Two Men, a Radio, and Apollo 11 (re-run)
In honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing,
I am today "re-running" this slightly edited combination of two posts that originally ran last summer.
Today we celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.* I wish those celebrations included more recognition of a unique accomplishment that is part of the Apollo 11 story but that is widely unknown: the work of Larry Baysinger—a man from my home town of Louisville, Kentucky—who independently detected signals from the Apollo 11 astronauts as they walked on the lunar surface. Baysinger's accomplishments were recorded and promptly published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, by another Louisvillian by the name of Glenn Rutherford, who later went on to be editor of the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville, The Record.
Rutherford was a 23-year-old reporter for the Courier-Journal, and his article about Baysinger was published under the headline “Lunar Eavesdropping: Louisvillians hear moon walk talk on homemade equipment”. Baysinger was a technician for Louisville’s WHAS 840 AM radio, and only a few years older than Rutherford. The story garnered some attention for Baysinger at the time. He was interviewed by the Collins Radio Company, who made the communications equipment that was used for the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury programs. They were very impressed that anyone could detect the Apollo signals with home-built equipment. However, in time the story faded from view. In 2009, when I first learned of the story, I saw just how much it had faded by doing searches for information using keywords such as “Baysinger” and “Apollo” in Google, as well as in EBSCO and JSTOR databases. These searches yielded no references to Baysinger’s work. Searching “Lunar Eavesdropping” yielded no returns of any sort at all. (Today such searches return more results, thanks in part to a 2010 article about Baysinger that I wrote for the National Association for Amateur Radio.)
Rutherford's story, from the July 23, 1969 issue of the Louisville Courier-Journal, on the front page of section B. Click on the image for a high-resolution version (although since this image is from microfilm, the image quality is poor, even in the high-resolution version).
Glenn Rutherford in 2009, when he was assistant editor for The Record newspaper in Louisville. Rutherford went on to become editor of, and then to retire from, The Record, which is the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville.
I learned about the story thanks to a discussion between Rutherford and me about some of the research Henry Sipes and I had going on at Otter Creek-South Harrison observatory. Rutherford had written about this research in a July 2009 article in The Record. Our discussion drifted into the issue of Kentuckians doing scientific research. That reminded Rutherford of the story of Baysinger’s work, and he told me the story. I later had the pleasure of speaking to Baysinger directly. It was remarkable that these two gentlemen, forty years later, should both still be here in Louisville, just a phone call away!
Baysinger told me that his Apollo lunar eavesdropping project arose because in the late 1960’s he was an amateur radio astronomer with an interest in NASA, in astronomy, in UFOs, and in other such things that were hot topics at a time when America was on the verge of landing its first men on the moon. He experimented with satellite tracking and capturing pictures of Earth transmitted from weather satellites. He had some success in these matters—for example, he was able to print out crude images from weather satellites using an impact printer that printed using carbon paper. These interests and efforts led to the idea that he might independently verify the information that NASA had been providing about the Apollo program. Could he get unedited, unfiltered information about the Apollo 11 landing by eavesdropping on the radio signals transmitted from the lunar surface? And could he find out things that NASA did not want the public to know about? But most of all, successfully detecting a transmission from the lunar surface would be a great technical accomplishment.
Left: Larry Baysinger in 2009. Right: Baysinger in 1969. The photo is taken through the frame of the antenna he built to listen in on the Apollo missions.
According to Baysinger, various local experts had said that it could not be done. However, information about the communication frequencies used by the Apollo missions was widely available. The March and June 1969 issues of CG: The Radio Amateur’s Journal, for example, contained this sort of information. If a person could build a good radio, he or she should be able to listen to Apollo. And not only did Baysinger listen to Apollo, but he recorded it, and saved those recordings for decades.
The March and June 1969 issues of CG. Click here and here to download selections from their articles concerning Apollo communications. These scans are from Baysinger's collection.
And, four decades later, Baysinger still had the reel-to-reel tape recordings that he had made. He transferred the salvageable sections of the tape to digital format. You can listen to his recording and compare it to NASA’s own recording here:
 Click on the image or click here to listen to Baysinger's own recording of the signals he received from Apollo 11 and recorded on his reel-to-reel tape recorder. The audio is a 9 MB WMA file. This image, from a 1969 newspaper article, shows Baysinger with his equipment. |
 Click on the image or click here to watch NASA footage and audio of the same material that Baysinger recorded (from NASA's YouTube channel). |
Some years later, the BBC Radio 3 included an interview with Baysinger and Rutherford in a show called “Space Ham”. By that point Baysinger had managed to salvage more of the tape, including a section with President Richard Nixon speaking to the astronauts. You can click below to hear their interview, in which they give a nice discussion of their experience:
Click on the image or click here for Rutherford and Baysinger on the BBC Radio 3. The BBC description says “Sound artist Caroline Devine sends Between the Ears into orbit in this celebration of amateur radio and space exploration. Since the dawn of the Space Age, amateur ‘ham’ radio has eavesdropped on our exploration of the cosmos. From Sputnik to the International Space Station, radio enthusiasts with homemade kit have been able tune into the distant sounds of space and talk to those exploring it.... Radio brought us Neil Armstrong's first transmission from the Moon and afforded ham operator, Larry Baysinger, the chance to intercept the radio transmissions between the astronauts. His recordings include the moment President Nixon transmitted his message of congratulations to them. Interwoven with these are Caroline Devine's artful reworking of other cosmic sounds picked up by ham receivers from across the world to create an ethereal and magical journey, a momentary re-ignition of the childlike wonder of space. Producer: Rose de Larrabeiti. Space Ham is a Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 3.” Click here for NASA footage of Nixon speaking to the astronauts.
One interesting thing you will hear Baysinger and Rutherford discuss in the interview is how they were hoping to hear something that the general public would not hear. And they did not. When I talked to Baysinger back in 2009, I asked him about this, and he said that absolutely everything was transmitted to the public on TV, and that, in fact, “that was kind of disappointing”. Part of the idea of this project was to hear the unedited “real story”, and it turned out there was nothing edited out. Indeed, Rutherford’s story in the Courier-Journal makes no mention of hearing anything unusual. Baysinger did not attempt to eavesdrop on any other Apollo missions. After Apollo 11 he moved on to other projects.
Various Google/EBSCO/JSTOR searches have convinced me that there certainly were not a lot of amateur radio astronomers eavesdropping on Apollo transmissions. An inquiry I made via the HASTRO-L history of astronomy e-mail listserver did turn up the web page of Sven Grahn. Grahn and Dick Flagg apparently received some signals from the Apollo 17 command module in orbit around the moon, although the voice signals they received were limited to two small sentence fragments and they were using a large dish to receive the signals. A German radio observatory also recorded signals from the Moon. I made inquiries with a number of people in the radio community, none of whom knew of anything comparable to Baysinger’s work. These include Zack Lau, Senior Lab Engineer for the ARRL (the national association for amateur radio) and their QST magazine, who responded to an e-mail I sent to QST to say that they have no record of anyone picking up signals from Apollo 11; Rachel Baughn, editor of Monitoring Times magazine, who responded to an e-mail I sent that she had no information on this sort of thing; and Jim Sky of Radio-Sky Journal who responded to an e-mail Henry Sipes sent to him—again, no additional information. Phil Plait featured Baysinger’s work on his Bad Astronomy blog. His readers posted many comments, but no definite information. In general, people seem to be aware that amateur radio enthusiasts and radio astronomers listened in on Apollo missions. But what was heard, whether the signals were received from the Moon or just from the Apollo spacecraft when they were in Earth orbit, and so forth is an open question. What truly makes Baysinger’s work unique is that it was recorded in print at the time, and that he not only received but recorded extensive audio, much of which has survived to this day. If someone else did succeed in eavesdropping on NASA, but no record was ever made, and if that someone is no longer around, we will not know about it.
Besides the obvious “local interest” aspect to this story, there is a great educational aspect as well. Most people are aware that there is a significant (or significantly vocal) “Apollo denier” movement that says that we never went to the moon. The Apollo deniers have received attention through shows on Fox and Mythbusters that address the Apollo deniers’ arguments. I have found that a noticeable minority of my students, or maybe more than just a noticeable minority, are at least open to the idea that we never went to the moon—an issue I have discussed on this blog more than once. In a sense this is not surprising. Today’s traditional-age college students were born many decades after Apollo 11. They have no memory of the moon landings—Apollo is just something in a book. And, it is not obvious that we will be returning to the moon any time soon; humankind today has little in the way of manned space capability beyond low Earth orbit. Thus the voyage to the moon probably seems to today’s students like a mythical voyage such as might have been made by Jason and the Argonauts, to a land which we visited once but to which we cannot go now. And, since all the evidence that we went to the moon comes from one source (NASA), it is relatively easy for conspiracy theorists to make their claims. Had thousands of amateur astronomers been able to see the men on the moon for themselves, there would be no Apollo deniers.
Baysinger’s lunar eavesdropping is an independent verification that men were on the moon, by a local person who is not part of the scientific establishment. Had there been more Larry Baysingers eavesdropping on Apollo, or had there been more Glenn Rutherfords to record the work of the Baysingers who did eavesdrop, there would be no Apollo deniers (this is an illustration of the importance of “reproducibility” in science).
For a more detailed discussion of Baysinger’s work, see Lunar Eavesdropping in Louisville, Kentucky, on the web page of my college’s observatory. These posts were based on that discussion, which includes some additional details, especially on technical matters.
* I note that while the Apollo 11 landing was a great achievement, worth celebrating, the fact that since the Apollo program we have not returned to the moon, or even left Earth orbit, is hugely disappointing. When I was a kid I thought average people might be able to travel the solar system in the early 21st century!
Kentucky Science Conversations – Teaching Our Faith (and Science)
The Archdiocese of Louisville (Kentucky) has been talking science. During the month of May, five articles on faith and science appeared in our diocesan newspaper, The Record. They were part of the “Teaching Our Faith” series that the paper runs periodically. I do not think such things are common in the pages of diocesan papers. I do think more science in diocesan papers would be a great thing.
The “Teaching Our Faith” articles were the idea of Louisville’s Archbishop, Joseph Kurtz. Archbishop Kurtz contributed a guest post to The Catholic Astronomer (now Sacred Space Astronomy) last November. At that time I told the story about how in September 2017, with astronomy “in the air” thanks to the August 2017 eclipse, Prof. Gerry Williger, an astronomer at the University of Louisville here in Kentucky, sent an invitation to Archbishop Kurtz to attend some of the talks that are part of the Public Astronomy Lecture Series hosted by UofL’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. Archbishop Kurtz got right back to Gerry, commenting on his own interest in astronomy, and suggesting that they get together to discuss their common interest. That led in turn to a number of get-togethers of local scientists with Archbishop Kurtz to talk science.
These gatherings are what led to the “Teaching Our Faith” articles. Archbishop Kurtz wrote the first of the five articles. He writes, “For the last few years, I have engaged with a group of Catholic scientists who serve in various settings in our Archdiocese. I very much enjoy our dialogue, both because of their erudition in science and because of their deep faith.”
So check out the “Teaching Our Faith” articles on faith and science, from The Record. They present a variety of perspectives on the topic, from people in a variety of fields. The articles are:
“Teaching Our Faith – Faith and science” (click here), May 1, 2019—by The Most Reverend Joseph E. Kurtz, D.D., Archbishop of Louisville
“Teaching Our Faith – Faith-full Scientists” (click here), May 8, 2019—by yours truly
“Evolution and Faith: Compatible and Complementary” (click here), May 15, 2019—by Dr. Kate Bulinski, Associate Professor of Geosciences in the School of Environmental Studies at Bellarmine University (and who also contributed a guest post to The Catholic Astronomer/Sacred Space Astronomy)
“Teaching Our Faith – Science, Faith and Mental Health” (click here), May 1, 2019—by Dr. Jim Shields, a clinical psychologist in private practice and a member of the deacon formation class of 2020
“Teaching Our Faith – Faith, Science and Care for Creation” (click here), May 1, 2019—by Tim Darst, the executive director of Kentucky Interfaith Power and Light and the associate director of Earth Literacy at the Passionist Earth & Spirit Center
The Far Sun – Far Beyond Comprehension
Does it seem dim outside? Well, it should—sort of. Because it is dim outside—sort of.
On this past Thursday, July 4, just before the end of the day as seen from London (at 11:10 pm British Standard Time), the Earth was at the aphelion point of its orbit—the point at which it is farthest from the sun. At that time it was 94,513,221 miles from the sun. By contrast, at its perihelion point (closest to the sun), on January 3, Earth was merely 91,403,554 miles from the sun.
The Earth’s orbit around the sun. Can you tell that it is not exactly a circle? Image from University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Earth is over 3,100,000 miles farther away from the sun now than it was in January. Of course, that is only a 3.4% difference. But if you observed the sun carefully, and measured its apparent diameter, you could see that difference. The fact that the distance between the sun and the Earth changes has been known since antiquity.
The apparent size of the sun as seen from Earth at perihelion (left) and six months later, at “aphelion” (right). Images created with Stellarium.
The sun is a remarkable object, really beyond our comprehension in many ways. First of all, there is its size. The diameter of the sun is over one hundred times the diameter of the Earth. See the circles in the figure below below? The sun is the big yellow one. The Earth is the little black one, indicated by the arrow. Even many of the sunspots are substantially larger than Earth. Fr. Christoph Scheiner, S. J., was the first person to do a really in-depth, long-term study of the sun, which he published in a huge book called Rosa Ursina Sive Sol (click here for a look at it). The drawing of sunspots at upper right in the figure below is the first sunspot drawing Scheiner ever made (this copy is from an article by Fr. Juan Casanovas, also S.J., who was a Vatican Observatory astronomer—the article is available on the V.O.'s Faith and Science pages—click here to check it out). The sunspot photo at lower right is from NASA.
The power output of the sun is 3.8x1026 Watts of power: 380,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Watts, or 380 septillion Watts. As best science can tell, this power comes from nuclear fusion reactions occurring in the sun’s core. These reactions are converting the sun’s mass into energy via E=mc2. A Watt of power is one Joule of energy per second, so every second the sun generates 3.8x1026 Joules of energy. A Joule is a kilogram times a meter divided by a square second (kgm/s2). The speed of light is 3x108 meters/second, so c2 = 9x1016 (m/s)2. So, using E=mc2, we find that in one second the sun converts
m =E/c2 = {3.8x1026J} / {9x1016 (m/s)2} = 4.22x109 kg
of its mass into energy. 4.22x109 kg is 4,220,000,000 kilograms, or 4.22 billion kilograms, of mass.
How much mass is that? Well, a kilogram is the mass of 1 liter of water. A liter of water weighs 2.2 lbs on Earth. A light truck, like the ever-popular Ford F-150, weighs about 2000 times that much (roughly 4400 lbs, according to Ford). So how many F-150s is 4.22 billion kilograms?
4,220,000,000 / 2000 = 2,110,000
So, that is over two million F-150s. In other words, to generate that 3.8x1026 Watts of power, in each and every second the sun converts into energy a mass equal to two million F-150 pickup trucks. In the time it takes you to read this sentence—whoosh! millions of trucks of mass are gone, turned into E=mc2 energy.
Yet while to us this seems like so much, to the sun it is nothing. The total mass of the sun is 2.0x1030 kg. How long will it take the sun to eat up 1% of that mass? Well, 1% of 2.0x1030 kg is
0.01 x 2.0x1030 kg = 2.0x1028 kg
As we calculated above, every second the sun converts 4.22x109 kg of its mass to energy. So the time to convert 2.0x1028 kg to energy will be
{2.0x1028 kg} / {4.22x109 kg/s} = 4.74x1018 seconds
There are 3.154x107 seconds in a year, so in terms of years, this is
{4.74x1018 s} / {3.154x107 s/yr} = 1.5x1011 years
That is 150,000,000,000 years, or 150 billion years! As best we scientists can tell, the universe itself appears to not even be 15 billion years old. Two million trucks-worth of mass vanishing into energy may seem like a lot to us, but it is truly nothing to the sun.
All of this is taking place 95 million miles above us. But in January, it will only be 91 million miles above us. So enjoy the extra distance while it lasts!
Max Planck on Religion and Science
My post from last week was about a cool entry on the Vatican Observatory—Faith and Science site about Enrico Fermi (click here for that post). I had come across Fermi again as I was doing a periodic review of all 500 entries in the site (which I edit), looking for errors and broken links.
In that same review, I came across some other cool entries regarding Max Planck. Planck was one of the key figures in the development of quantum mechanics. I was thinking about doing a post on these Planck entries when Fr. Kurzynski's “Dispelling the Myth” post appeared (click here for it). Upon reading about yet another instance of the promotion in schools of the idea that there is conflict between religion and science, and about Fr. Kurzynski's effort to present “an image of peace between faith and science”, I decided that a focus on Planck is in order.
Again, in my opinion the best material to address this issue comes from scientists who are men and women of faith, bearing witness to that faith. That is especially true when the scientist is of Planck's caliber. And, as with Fermi last week, my point here is not to put Planck up on a pedestal as a model of faith, or a saint of some sort. But it is worth knowing that a Nobel-Prize-winning key figure in the history of science writes things like this:
To the religious person, God is directly and immediately given. He and His omnipotent Will are the fountainhead of all life and all happenings, both in the mundane world and in the world of the spirit. Even though He cannot be grasped by reason, the religious symbols give a direct view of Him, and He plants His holy message in the souls of those who faithfully entrust themselves to Him. In contrast to this, the natural scientist recognizes as immediately given nothing but the content of his sense experiences and of the measurements based on them. He starts out from this point, on a road of inductive research, to approach as best he can the supreme and eternally unattainable goal of his quest—God and His world order. Therefore, while both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view....
So check out the following from Vatican Observatory—Faith and Science:
Max Planck on Religion and Science (click here)
Max Planck on Johannes Kepler and Faith in Science (click here)
Religion and Natural Science – Max Planck (click here)
Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War (click here)
Enrico Fermi, the Farmer, and the Sky
Look to the top of your screen. There it says Vatican Observatory—The Catholic Astronomer—Sacred Space Astronomy. You are looking at one pretty cool science site. But there is a sister site here, too: Vatican Observatory—Faith and Science. I edit that site, meaning I get to do cool stuff like read interesting books for the purpose of finding good content for the site, and I have to do tedious stuff like periodically plow through all 500 entries in the site, looking for errors and broken links.
Recently that plowing brought me to, and refreshed my memory of, a really great Vatican Observatory—Faith and Science (VOF&S) entry, on Enrico Fermi (1901-1954). Fermi was one of the 20th century’s great physicists. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938. His contributions to science are too numerous to list here, and the VOF&S entry is not about those contributions; it is about his recollection of the thoughts of an Italian farmer regarding the night sky and God. It is worth a read.
Much has been said on the subject of Faith and Science. But the best material on this subject is not discussions of philosophy, or history, or whatnot. The best material comes from scientists who are men and women of faith, bearing witness to that faith. This is not to put anyone on a pedestal—not to set Fermi up as a model of faith, or a saint of some sort. Fermi’s work, for example, advanced our understanding of physics of very small particles in important ways; it also helped to develop nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the question of whether faith and science are compatible is never answered so affirmatively* and well as when a scientist, and especially a scientist of Fermi’s caliber, writes on faith. So CLICK RIGHT HERE for a cool VOF&S entry on Enrico Fermi and an Italian farmer and the night sky. I think you’ll love it.
*That the answer is affirmative is important to everyone who is involved in science. There are students in my classes from a wide variety of cultures who see science as incompatible with their faith, and therefore they will not take science seriously. Their faith is far more important to them than some science course that is required for a degree that they want. I need Enrico Fermi (and others) in order to help me engage a diverse student population and convince them that science is for them, too. All of science needs him (click here for more on that).
Looking for Wormwood
Artemisia absinthium (wormwood)
“Is the Vatican Observatory searching for the star called Wormwood from the Book of Revelation?”
This question was asked during the Q&A session that followed a talk about the V.O. given by one of the members of the Vatican Observatory Foundation’s Board of Directors.
Those who hear “wormwood” and think of an herb, sometimes found in soaps and teas, simply are not keeping up with all the latest from the Internet. Here is the portion of Revelation, from the 8th and 9th chapters, where Wormwood makes an appearance (King James Version):
And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound. The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed. And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise. And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound! And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.
Obviously a lot of stuff is falling to Earth in these verses—hail, fire, blood, a burning mountain, and a couple of stars. Anything involving the sky and this much catastrophe is sure to have a following. Phil Plait, who was in the graduate program in astronomy at the University of Virginia when I was there, wrote a book with the title Death from the Skies! I think it sold pretty well. And if sky-plus-catastrophe is sure to have a following, it is absolutely certain to have a following on the Internet. Indeed, a bit of searching reveals that some folks have spent a fair bit of time spinning up “Wormword” material on the web.
Just a bit of what an image search on the Wormwood star from the Revelation turns up.
When you consider that, prior to the development of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, any permanent light in the sky was a “star” (including, for example, the five planets visible to the naked eye), the “trumpets” passage from Revelation does sound like perhaps it might be a description of a pretty devastating meteor bombardment. And so perhaps the person who asked the “Wormwood” question was wondering if the Vatican Observatory is busy with a kind of scripturally-inspired search for asteroids or other bodies that might be “Wormwood” and its various Companions of Doom.
That’s not a crazy idea. Big meteors have hit in Siberia, and in Arizona. A really big meteor strike is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Astronomers all over the world watched a comet hit Jupiter in 1994. Plait even has a TED talk on this stuff:
Indeed, another guy I went to school with, Tim Grayson, once did research on building a telescope to search for faint objects that might strike Earth. He wrote a paper on the subject, published in 2002: “Curved Focal Plane Wide Field of View Telescope Design”—a paper that has been frequently cited since (“frequently” as such things go). But, Grayson worked for DARPA at the time—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—not for the Vatican. He works for DARPA now, too, as the director of its Strategic Technology Office. Considering that DARPA’s budget for 2019 is $3.427 Billion, it is a reasonable bet that in a few days at work Grayson goes through as much money as the V.O. spends in a year on its Italian and American telescopes combined. Moreover, NASA has had a program to search for “Near Earth Objects” (“NEOs”) for some time. According to NASA, in 1998 the agency established a goal “to discover 90% of the NEOs larger than one kilometer in diameter and in 2005, Congress extended that goal to include 90% of the NEOs larger than 140 meters”. NASA does have a “Planetary Defense Coordination Office” that is in the business of worrying about NEOs. Moreover, in June of last year the White House released a “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan” and proposed boosting NASA’s budget for this to $150 million. With that budget, NASA will be spending more money in a few days, just on NEO’s, than the V.O. spends in a year.
Meteor Crater in Arizona. From a NEO that got a little too close, releasing a few megatons of energy when it hit. Note the road and the parking lot in the foreground. Photo from Shane Torgerson, Wikimedia Commons.
Therefore, if the person asking that “Wormwood” question was supposing that Revelation is describing an actual natural phenomenon—an Earth-threatening storm of meteors/asteroids—and wondering if someone could search for that, the answer is obviously “yes”. But the V.O. is not really the observatory with the budget for that sort of thing.
However, let’s read further from this passage in Revelation. It quickly becomes clear that an actual natural phenomenon is probably not what Revelation is describing:
And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth.... And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.
If the person asking that “Wormwood” question was supposing that Revelation is not describing a natural phenomenon—if the question was whether the V.O. was searching for the supernatural, in other words—then the question makes no sense. A telescope at an observatory detects natural phenomena. There is no reason to suppose that any telescope is of any use in detecting a supposedly supernatural “star” that descends to Earth, prompting the opening of a pit that spews forth horse-shaped, man-faced, lion-toothed, scorpion-tailed, iron-armored locusts. That would be like supposing that a balance would be of use in measuring the weight of angels, or that a graduated cylinder would be of use in measuring the quantity of blessings.
Of course, maybe the person asking the “Wormwood” question was supposing that the “star” that descends to Earth and prompts the opening of a pit that spews forth horse-shaped, man-faced, armor-wearing locusts is in fact describing ... a SPACECRAFT! ... that descends to Earth and unleashes a horde of horse-shaped, man-faced, scorpion-tailed alien warriors! Oh, how cool is that? It sounds like something from an “Avengers” movie, does it not? But if that is the case, then we’re back to talking about a natural phenomenon again—a physical thing approaching Earth. And in that case, DARPA and NASA have the V.O. beat, as we have seen.
Avengers: The Incredible Hulk battles the armored hordes from the sky!
The astronomical research that the Vatican Observatory does, and that most astronomical observatories do, is far more nerdy and far less glamorous than all this. Most observatories are not seeking out Near Earth Objects that might collide with Earth. Without a doubt, collisions with Earth make for entertaining talks—and no, they are not just a matter of fantasy. However, the overwhelming bulk of what know about the universe comes from astronomers doing nerdy research that lacks much glamour and entertainment value.
Click here or here for a couple of posts about actual research done with the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, or VATT. At these posts you can learn about such glamorous work as “High Resolution Optical Spectroscopy of the Classical Nova V5668 Sgr Showing the Presence of Lithium”, or “Discovery, observational data and the orbit of the Transneptunian object (420356) Praamzius”, or “Heterodyne Interferometry with a Supercontinuum Local Oscillator.” It isn’t part of The Planetary Defense, but it is valuable astronomical work.
Science that is not boring.
I think we astronomers have to accept some blame for questions like “are you looking for Wormwood?” Astronomers put a lot of effort into telling people about exciting, dynamic stuff—stars being born! stars dying! worlds and galaxies in collision! change! chaos! excitement! Things Blowing Up!!! Better yet—THINGS BLOWING THE EARTH UP!!!! We all want science to catch people’s attention. We don’t want science to be boring. Exciting, catchy things get lots of emphasis in popular science. After all, who is going to listen to a TED talk about Heterodyne Interferometry, Lithium in classical nova V5668 Sgr, or Transneptunian object (420356) Praamzius? Scientists play a part in all this, so we should not be surprised that so many people are interested in Death from the Skies.
That said, however, the VATT indeed does do some NEO work. Check out “The Four-Color Broadband Photometry for Physical Characterization of Fast Rotator NEOs”. And Larry Lebofsky has written about using the VATT to look for NEOs in a recent post. If NASA paid a call to V.O. Director (and Boss of this Blog) Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., and asked if the V.O. would do more NEO work if NASA provided the funding, I doubt that he would turn them down. After all, Br. Guy is an asteroid/meteor guy. And what is more, he is a real science fiction nerd who would love being part of The Planetary Defense Action Team. And maybe they could even call that work “Project Wormwood”. It’d keep the Internet abuzz, at any rate.
Elena Cornaro Piscopia – Google Doodle Scientist
Click here for other posts about “Google Doodle Scientists”.
Did you use Google yesterday? If you did, you probably saw the "Google Doodle" in honor of Elena Cornaro Piscopia. Piscopia was the first woman to receive a doctoral degree (PhD) from a university (the University of Padua in Italy, in 1678). And, she is yet another Google Doodle scientist who was a person of faith.
With a little digging (not an exhaustive search by any means) I found the following articles that seem to provide some details about Piscopia for a broad audience:
- An article by Deirdre Pirro, published in 2013 by The Florentine—click here for Pirro’s article.
- An article from Vassar College (there is a stained glass window of Piscopia in the library at Vassar)—click here for the Vassar article.
- The Wikipedia entry on Piscopia—click here for it.
Various sources report that Piscopia was an oblate of the Benedictine order. She wanted to join the order as a nun, but her father objected (she is featured on the web page of the International Benedictine Oblates). Over one hundred years ago a Benedictine abbess found her neglected tomb, took an interest in her story, and generally brought Piscopia back into the public view.
Various news sources reporting on the Piscopia Google Doodle state that “the Roman Catholic Church” would not allow her to receive a doctorate in theology because she was a woman.
From the web page of The Independent in the UK (arrow added).
Apparently the local cardinal would not allow the theology degree because that would qualify her to teach theology and that was not acceptable. However, he was OK with a philosophy degree. That cardinal might not be “the Roman Catholic Church”, but fair enough. However, what might be overlooked here is the fact that a lot of people would not allow a lot of things in Piscopia’s case. The government would not allow her to be recognized as her father’s legitimate child, because he was a rich man who had apparently fallen in love with, and definitely had many children by, someone who was very poor (eventually he married her mother and had their children “made legitimate” by paying out a lot of money to the government of Venice). Piscopia was educated through private tutoring because no one allowed women to go to school. Her father would not allow her be a nun. And what she really wanted to do was serve the poor.
This makes her accomplishments—ending up knowing seven languages and being well-versed in geometry, astronomy, and medicine, with the first doctorate ever awarded to a woman—and still serving the poor—all that more remarkable. It seems that in the end, she won everyone over and became a celebrated figure, this devout woman who did so many things that she really wasn’t supposed to be allowed to do.
Piscopia as portrayed in the Vassar College library.
Astronomy in Art & Architecture: The Stars of St. Rose, Cincinnati
Those readers of The Catholic Astronomer who have been following this blog for a while will be familiar with my “Art & Architecture” posts (click here for all of them). When I first began writing them, I had the idea that astronomical themes would be easy to find in art and in architecture if I kept my eyes open. But I have found that in fact astronomy in art and architecture is less common than I expected. So when I was in Cincinnati visiting the Cincinnati Observatory (the subject of two recent posts), I was happy to discover St. Rose Church and its ceiling of stars.
St. Rose Church, Cincinnati, Ohio. The Ohio River is visible behind the church.
St. Rose sits on the north bank of the Ohio River, just a bit upstream from downtown Cincinnati. On the outside of the church is a plaque that reads, in the German language of the immigrant community that the church first served, “St. Rosa Kirche, Errechtet A.D. 1868”—“St. Rose Church, Erected A.D. 1868”. On the inside there is much art and architecture to see, but what really catches the eye of an astronomer is the half-dome ceiling of stars that forms a canopy above the main altar.
The front of St. Rose as seen from the pews. This photo was taken on a cloudy day before noon mass in relatively low light, and the various alcoves in the church are illuminated, so the illumination really stands out.
The stars of St. Rose are not a particularly realistic depiction of the heavens: they are all five-pointed, which is not realistic, and they are too densely packed together to be realistic. But they do have differing magnitudes and colors, which is cool. And what really caught my eye is how the larger, gold-colored stars are all depicted as having three golden rays emerging from them. These rays are all directed away from the “zenith” of the half-dome. I cannot recall having seen this in depictions of stars before. It is very eye-catching. Maybe that’s the point. Or, maybe the rays represent something else, and this astronomer has missed the point.
Closer photos of the starry half-dome. Note the trio of rays emerging from each of the larger, golden stars.
Whatever the point the artist who painted the stars was trying to make with the rays, if you are in the area, check out the stars of St. Rose!
Another interesting and slightly “science-y” thing about St. Rose is that, since it has been sitting on the banks of the Ohio since 1868, it has seen a lot of floods, and there is a big flood gauge painted on the back of the church, with the levels of record floods marked. In other words, there is a big measuring instrument and data record, if you will, on the back of the church, one that lots of people see! Note the 1937 flood mark.
How a Jesuit Astronomer and His Student beat Isaac Newton to a Key Idea by more than 50 Years
The Title Page of Disquisitions
In 1614, well before Isaac Newton was even born, a German Jesuit astronomer named Christoph Scheiner and his student, Johann Georg Locher, developed an explanation for how the Earth could orbit the sun. Earth, they said, was like a massive ball, perpetually falling toward the sun. They discussed this in their 1614 book Disquisitiones Mathematicae de Controversiis et Novitatibus Astronomicis, or Mathematical Disquisitions Concerning Astronomical Controversies and Novelties (recently translated by yours truly, and published by the University of Notre Dame Press—click here). This was Locher’s thesis for his degree from the University of Ingolstadt, where Fr. Scheiner taught.
Fr. Scheiner is a relatively well-known figure in the history of astronomy. He is the astronomer with whom Galileo debated regarding sunspots; he would go on to write a monumental 1630 book based on his long-term, detailed solar observations: Rosa Ursina Sive Sol. This book would define solar astronomy for decades. By contrast, not much is known about Locher. Galileo himself devoted quite a few pages of his 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican to making sport of Disquisitions, which was considered Scheiner’s work as much as Locher’s. It was the “booklet of theses, which is full of novelties” that Galileo had his less-than-brilliant character Simplicio drag out in order to defend one or another wrong-headed idea.
But Disquisitions is nothing like Galileo’s negative portrayal of it (by this point, readers of The Catholic Astronomer probably will not be surprised at this, granted the recent discoveries regarding Galileo’s letter to Castelli of 1613, which were the subject of one recent post here, and granted some of the other strange things Galileo says in the Dialogue, which were the subject of a series of posts). There is in fact a lot of cool stuff in Disquisitions. However, its discussion on the physics of an orbit is extra cool.
This discussion treats an orbit as a perpetual fall. It appears in a part of the book that treats the issue of movement downward on Earth. “Everyone,” Locher writes, “even Copernicans, acknowledges heavy bodies to be pulled down toward the center of Earth along a vertical line”. He notes that the downward urge of heavy material is the reason why the terrestrial globe exists, and why its center of gravity coincides with its geometric center. However, because of evaporations and eruptions and other processes on Earth, the center of gravity is changing, and therefore “the globe itself must vacillate with a certain perpetual, but entirely insensible, trembling”. Locher then says that, “perpetual motion is not incompatible with nature.” And, from this statement, he launches into his discussion of orbital “perpetual motion.”
Imagine, says Locher, an L-shaped rod, buried in the Earth. The asymmetry of the rod means that it would topple were it cut off at Earth’s surface. This would be all the more true, he says, were a heavy iron ball attached to the end of the rod, as shown in the figures below. Now, he says, imagine the rod being hinged at the Earth’s surface (at point A in the figures). The heaviness or gravity of the ball (“gravity” here meaning the ball’s action of trying to reach its natural place at the center of the universe—Aristotelian physics was the rule in 1614, with Newtonian ideas about gravity lying decades in the future) presses down on the rod, but the rod keeps the ball from falling straight down, so the ball causes the rod to pivot about the hinge. The ball falls along an arc of a circle whose center is A. The ball strikes the Earth at B.
Left—An iron ball attached to an L-shaped rod, buried in the Earth. Right—When the rod is hinged at Earth’s surface (A), the ball falls in a circular path and strikes the ground at B.
Next, says Locher, imagine that the Earth is made smaller relative to the rod. The same thing still occurs—the rod pivots; the iron ball falls in a circular arc. If the Earth is imagined to be smaller still, the rod will be what hits the ground, not the ball, so the ball stops at its lowest possible point (C as shown in the figure below), but it still falls in a circular arc whose center is A. If the Earth is imagined to be progressively smaller, the ball still falls, driven by its gravity, in a circular arc.
The iron ball falls in a circular path, even as Earth is imagined to be smaller and smaller.
At last Locher says to imagine the rod to be pivoting on the center of the universe itself—the Earth vanishing to a point. Surely, he says, in this situation, a complete and perpetual revolution will take place around that same pivot point A (fiet reuolutio integra & perpetua circa idem A). If the rod is put into motion, it will circle back around to its starting point, and continue on from there again, as before, “and so on into perpetuity.” You can see all this in the illustration that Locher made for Disquisitions, seen below. Curves MN, OP, and QR are the surface of the Earth, being imagined smaller and smaller. S is the iron ball. A is the center of the universe. Circle CHIC is the path of the orbiting ball.
Left—as Earth is imagined to shrink to a point, the ball swings in a circle around the Earth. Right—Locher’s diagram of this. Curves MN, OP, and QR are the surface of the Earth, imagined smaller and smaller. S is the iron ball. A is the center of the universe. Circle CHIC is the path of the orbiting ball.
In this way, says Locher, we see that perpetual circular motion by a heavy body is possible. And if we imagine the Earth being in the place of the iron ball, suspended over the center of the universe, he says, now we have a thought experiment (cogitatione percipi possit—it may be able to be perceived by thought) that shows how the Earth might be made to revolve about that center, and therefore about the sun, which sits at the center of the universe in the Copernican world system. The Earth would revolve about the sun because it would be perpetually falling into the sun, in the same manner as the iron ball would be falling into Earth.
Now is that cool or what? That is, in my opinion, a very nice, clever, plausible, and understandable explanation of how an orbit might work.
Isaac Newton also explained orbits as a perpetual fall—some decades later. He explained orbits using a cannon ball launched from atop a mountain and falling to Earth. This is the explanation that students everywhere learn today in science class, and it is the explanation that you will hear on science shows like NOVA:
The idea that an orbit is a perpetual fall is the modern explanation for how things orbit. So, Locher’s discussion seems prescient. However, he himself attributed little weight to this idea. Even if such motion could actually occur, it would not help the Copernicans, he said, because it explains no observations.
The system of Tycho Brahe, as illustrated in Disquisitions
Locher believed that the Earth was immobile at the center of the universe. He felt that observations of both astronomical and terrestrial phenomena supported an Earth-centered system, and opposed any motion of the Earth. He backed the system of Tycho Brahe, where the sun, moon, and stars circled an immobile Earth while the planets circled the sun—a system that was fully compatible with the new telescopic discoveries of the time, such as the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter. Indeed, Locher saw these discoveries as supporting the old geocentric ideas. For example, he saw moons going around Jupiter not as supporting the Copernican system, as Galileo did, but as supporting the old Ptolemaic concept of epicycles. To Locher, the moons going around Jupiter as Jupiter itself moved was proof of the ancient concept of epicycles—circles moving upon circles. Ptolemy had postulated the existence of epicycles, Locher said, in order to explain the visually observed motions of the planets. Now, however, “the optic tube has established... that the center of the motions of the Jovian satellites is Jupiter.... Therefore epicycles do exist in the heavens”. Locher also questioned at length how falling bodies could be observed to descend vertically on a rotating Earth, since different points on a rotating Earth all move at differing speeds. And he attacked the Copernicans for their views regarding the sizes of stars.
A star as seen through a very small aperture telescope, such as was used in the early seventeenth century (from J. F. W. Herschel’s 1828 Treatises on Physical Astronomy, Light and Sound). The globe-like appearance is entirely spurious, an artefact of optics (although this was not understood in Locher’s time) that makes the star appear vastly larger than it truly is. The vast sizes required for stars in the Copernican system in order for them both to show such size and to lie at such great distances that Earth’s motion around the sun produced no observable effects, was to Locher an argument for Earth’s immobility, and thus the Copernican system was to be rejected despite his physics explaining how Earth could orbit the sun.
Even viewed through a telescope, stars were observed to have small but measurable disks, disks that in the first half of the seventeenth century were yet to be understood as spurious products of the optics of the telescope, and that did not represent the real bodies of the stars. Under the Copernican system, stars had to be so distant that by comparison the Earth’s orbit was like a point—immeasurably small, producing no observable effects. Locher noted that, since “small but measurable” is larger than “immeasurably small,” under the Copernican system every last visible star had to be larger than the Earth’s orbit. The Copernicans did not deny this, said Locher, but rather chalked up the giant stars to the power of God. Locher thought that was a “laughable” attempt to deal with the star size issue. In summary, Locher did not believe that his mechanism for explaining how Earth might orbit the sun could save the Copernican system from its flaws.
In 1651, Fr. Giovanni Battista Riccioli, an Italian Jesuit astronomer, dismissed Locher’s orbit mechanism. Riccioli was another Brahe-style geocentrist, and in his 1651 book Almagestum Novum, or New Almagest (referencing Ptolemy’s classic Almagest), he further developed the star size argument against Copernicus; he also went beyond questions about falling bodies and differing speeds on the surface of a rotating Earth, to develop arguments against Earth’s motion in which the modern reader will recognize the “Coriolis Effect”. But while Riccioli may have been of like mind with Locher on these matters, he dismissed the Disquisitions orbit mechanism in short fashion. Crediting Disquisitions to Scheiner, Riccioli wrote, “that most acute explorer of the sun hallucinates [hallucinatur]”. He did not grasp the thought experiment presented in Disquisitions. He only considered the final case of the ball orbiting a point. He omitted mention of the rod and ball standing on Earth’s surface and toppling, and his illustration of Locher’s diagram was very bare-bones. The idea of imagining the Earth to be smaller and smaller, and supposing that if the iron ball would naturally move in a circular path for an arbitrarily small Earth, then it would do so for a vanishingly small Earth, seems to have eluded him. Likewise a later Jesuit, Fr. Athanasius Kircher, included in his 1680 book Physiologia a bare-bones version of the orbit diagram from Disquisitions, along with an insultingly dismissive discussion. “Here I cannot disregard,” wrote Kircher, not mentioning Locher or Scheiner by name, “the vain fabrications and manifest paralogisms of some, which they believe—no, they assert—to demonstrate artificial perpetual motion to be able to be made by a sure way around the center of earth, and which they strive to show by this reasoning....” After providing a synopsis of the mechanism (a synopsis that again overlooked the concept of Earth being made smaller and smaller), Kircher continued, “I can hardly keep from laughing at the deceitful fallacies of the human imagination”. According to Kircher, this whole idea was the equivalent of saying that, were a trough built that encircled the globe, a ball would roll around it, or water would continually flow around it, forever.
Left—Riccioli’s version of Locher’s diagram. Right—Kircher’s version. Note how Frs. Riccioli and Kircher both show only the final outcome of Locher’s thought process—namely, the ball orbiting a point—and omit the circles that show the Earth being imagined to be progressively smaller.
Newton’s “Cannon on a mountain” illustration, from his 1728 A Treatise of the System of the World.
By the time Fr. Kircher wrote this, Isaac Newton was already building the physics we now use. Unlike Locher and Scheiner, Newton departed from Aristotelian physics entirely, but he and they both agreed that an orbit is essentially a perpetual fall. So, you might wonder: did Newton ever encounter the ideas found in Disquisitions? Might he have even been inspired by them? There are hints to suggest that he might have encountered them, at least through Riccioli. Newton had a copy of the Almagestum Novum in his library. He and Robert Hooke exchanged letters in 1679-1680 regarding the easterly deflection that a heavy ball, suspended by a cord and then released, should exhibit were Earth rotating—one of the “Coriolis” arguments advanced by Riccioli against Earth’s rotation (the apparent absence of such deflection indicating Earth’s immobility to Riccioli). You can find the details on all this in Setting Aside All Authority (also by yours truly, also from the University of Notre Dame Press—click here).
Newton references Riccioli in his first edition of the Principia, the book in which he develops so much of his physics, but only in relation to the distance to the moon. Evidence that Newton ever encountered Disquisitions itself is difficult to turn up, and it seems doubtful that Riccioli’s perfunctory discussion of the Disquisitions orbit mechanism would have provided inspiration to anyone.
What happened to Locher after publishing his book? We do not know. Perhaps he died shortly after publishing Disquisitions. Perhaps he went off to missionary work in some far-flung place. Or, perhaps he went into charity work in a nearby place. He says in Disquisitions that he was from Munich. In the 1872 book Das Matrikelbuch der Universitæt Ingolstadt-Landshut-München under “Doctoren der Rechte” appears “Joh. Georg Locher, München [that is, Munich]” for 1617. The 1895 book Die Kunstdenkmale des Regierungsbezirkes Oberbayern notes a “Georg Locher, Waisenpfleger aus München”—a person who cares for orphans—as having in 1649 donated art to a certain church. All this plausibly could refer to the same Locher. If it is the same Locher (and that is a big “if”), then perhaps Locher found a calling in his own home town that was more important to him than science. Perhaps, sort of like Louis Sansbury, his strongest calling was to care for people in his community. We are deep in speculation here. However, it does not seem too speculative to suppose that, had he remained active in the scientific community, he might have developed his physics further. After all, he (with Fr. Scheiner) came up with the idea that an orbit is a perpetual fall.
The bottom line is this: The key idea of an orbit being a perpetual fall was proposed as early as 1614 by a Jesuit astronomer and his student. That idea circulated among knowledgeable readers. It came to the attention of and was discussed by two prominent Jesuit authors. However, the idea of an orbit as a perpetual fall was dismissed by those authors, and it had never been further developed by its originators. It would be proposed again by Isaac Newton, under a new physics, and would come to be the explanation that everyone learns in school of how an object remains in an orbit.
I am pleased to share all this with you, O Reader of The Catholic Astronomer. You will not have heard this story before, because it is all new research, just published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy in February 2019. In fact, this post is a modified version of the JHA paper. Click here to see the full published paper. Click here to see an early version of this story that I wrote as a guest post for The Renaissance Mathematicus blog back in 2016.
How Frs. Riccioli and Dechales Argued that Science Shows the Earth to be at Rest – The Coriolis Effect (re-run)
This is a "re-run" of a post that originally ran on July 19, 2017.
My post for next week will feature Fr. Riccioli and the Coriolis Effect,
so revisiting this topic seems like a good idea.
Hurricane Sandy from 2012. Credit:NOAA.
The Coriolis Effect is an apparent deflection of projectiles and falling bodies that is caused by the rotation of the Earth. It is named for Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis, a French scientist who described it mathematically in the early 19th century. It is responsible for the rotation of weather patterns such as hurricanes. But it turns out that a century and a half before Coriolis did his work, other scientists were discussing the Coriolis Effect. These scientists were Jesuits—Fr. Giovanni Battista Riccioli, who discussed the effect in his 1651 book Almagestum Novum, and Fr. Claude François Milliet Dechales, who discussed the effect and included some nice simple diagrams of it in his 1674 book Cursus seu Mundus Mathematicae.
What is interesting about this is that Riccioli and Dechales were discussing an effect that they did not believe to exist. Their whole point was that, were Earth rotating like Copernicus says, that rotation would produce observable effects—deflection of projectiles and falling bodies. Since these effects are not observed, that is an argument against Copernicus, and in favor of an immobile Earth.
Now, they were wrong about the effect not existing. The effect exists, but it is much harder to observe than one might expect. Indeed, even Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke in 1679-1680 tried, without success, to use the effect to prove Earth’s rotation.
Dechales's tower illustration, from a 1690 edition of Cursus seu Mundus mathematicus. Click here for the entire page.
How does the Coriolis Effect work? Well, let’s let Dechales explain it—he explains it well, using very clear illustrations. First the deflection of falling bodies:
A ball F, hanging from the top of a tower directly above point G, is dropped. While the ball descends, point G is carried [by Earth’s rotation] into I. I propose the ball F to be unable to arrive at point G (now at I). This is because the ball when positioned at F has a momentum [impetus] requisite for passing through arc FH (through which the tower top moves while the ball descends) which is greater than that requisite for arc GI. Therefore, if the ball is dropped, it will not arrive at point I, but will advance forward farther [to L].
Then, the deflection of projectiles:
Likewise, consider a cannon discharged in the direction of one of the poles [of the Earth]. During the time in which the ball would traverse the distance MO, the cannon [originally at M] would be carried to N, while the target [originally at O] would be carried to P. While the ball was at M, it had from the rotation of the Earth momentum able to carry it through arc MN (which is greater than arc OP) during the time required to travel from M to O. But the ball, separated from the cannon, conserves this momentum whole [totum hunc impetum conservat]. Therefore it should run through a distance greater than OP, and consequently not hit the target.
 Dechales's cannon illustration, from a 1690 edition of Cursus seu Mundus mathematicus. Click here for the entire page. |
 You can read all about this in this month’s issue of Physics Today! Just click here. |
Note how Dechales illustrates the cannon ball passing to the right of the target. For a more detailed discussion from the Cornell University ArXiv preprint server, click here.
Georgios Papanikolaou: Google Doodle Scientist
Google Doodle for George Nicholas Papanicolaou. Click here for other posts about “Google Doodle Scientists”.
If you used Google today you certainly noticed today’s Google Doodle scientist—George Nicholas Papanicolaou (Georgios Nikolaou Papanikolaou), inventor of the Pap smear test that enabled the early discovery of cervical cancer and other diseases. There are a few bits of information that suggests that Papanikolaou was a scientist of faith:
- He was buried from St. Sophia Orthodox church in Miami.
- The journal Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine has an interview with Dr. Neda Voutsa-Perdiki, who wrote a 2016 book in Greek whose title in translation is Dr George and Mache-Mary Papanicolaou - As I knew them (published by the Medical Council of Athens, Greece). Dr. Voutsa-Perdiki states that “The secret of his [Papanicolaou’s] scientific success was hard work, dedication, love of research, faith and the courage he gained from his wife and colleagues.” Dr. Voutsa-Perdiki also states that “He [Papanicolaou] frequently referred to the Easter season, especially to the mystagogy of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and the byzantine melodies of the church. In Kyme, as a child, he used to sing at the church those days himself. For this reason, he used to spend his Easter holidays with his nephew Vaggelis Stamatiou and his family, who lived close to Dr Papanicolaou's house in Douglaston.”
An article in the Singapore Medical Journal notes that “In 1904, he graduated from medical school with top honours. After graduation, Papanicolaou worked in the military as an assistant surgeon for a short time, then returned to his hometown, Kimi. For the next two years, he cared for leprosy patients on the outskirts of his hometown. These outcasts were socially isolated, and Papanicolaou gave them both medical and personal care with compassion and grace.”- An article in the New York Times from 1978 about the planting of a tree at Cornell University Manhattan Medical College in honor of Papanicolaou notes that the tree (which was grown from a seedling obtained from the tree under which the Greek physician Hippocrates is said to have received patients in the latter part of the fifth century B.C.) was blessed by The Most Rev. Iakovos, primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in North and South America at the time.
This post is just something I quickly put together based on a very little bit of research, so please do not consider it any sort of definitive statement on Dr. Papanicolaou. If you like this little post, and you like how it is a completely different perspective from anything else you would have found when you clicked that Google Doodle, then consider clicking right here and supporting the outfit that makes this possible—the Vatican Observatory Foundation. The VOF is the outfit that keeps the Vatican’s U.S. telescope (on Mount Graham in Arizona) running. That’s why this blog exists—to keep that telescope doing science. Support the blog—support the telescope—support science.
Sun & Moon—The Museum and the Market Square
How often do astronomical objects appear in art and architecture? That seems to depend on where you are. If you are in a museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, you might see very little. If you are in a market square in San Antonio, Texas, you might find yourself surrounded by it.
Both Market Square and Art Museum have characters to greet you.
When my wife and I were in Cincinnati to visit the observatory there (click here and here for posts on that observatory), we decided to visit the Cincinnati Art Museum. The goal of our visit was to find astronomical imagery in art work. Astronomy in art and architecture has always seemed to me to be a great topic for The Catholic Astronomer. It is something that might appeal to a very broad variety of people (click here for posts on the “Astronomy in Art & Architecture” theme). Of course it is something that might especially appeal to people interested in astronomy, and to Catholics (given the emphasis on art and architecture in the Catholic Church).
But the Cincinnati Art Museum turned out to be largely devoid of astronomical imagery. There were some representations of the moon on “tall-case clocks” (“grandfather clocks”)—these were cool, as you will see below. There were also some very generic representations of the sun or moon as part of a few paintings—but even these were pretty rare.
The lack of astronomical imagery in the Cincinnati Art Museum came to mind again when we were in San Antonio. We stopped by the Market Square there (“the largest Mexican Market in the U.S.”, according to various sources). In the market, astronomical imagery was everywhere—representations of the sun, moon, and stars abounded. As you will see below, these were not “realistic” representations; not depictions of astronomical objects as they truly appear to the eye. However, more astronomical imagery could be found on one wall or shelf in the San Antonio market than in the entire Cincinnati Art Museum.
So, let us first look at astronomical imagery in
THE MUSEUM:
A tall-case clock in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s collection. The clock shows the phase of the moon, and how many days have passed in the lunar cycle—very cool. The clock was made by the Philadelphia clockmaker Peter Stretch, and dates to about the year 1740. (All information in this post regarding items from the Cincinnati Art Museum comes from the museum.)
These are some of the works in the Cincinnati Art Museum that have some representation of the sun or moon. From left to right, these are portions of “Moonlit Lake” (by Ralph Albert Blakelock, painted 1890), “Golden Sunset” (George Inness, 1862), and “The Premonition” (Paul Marioni, 1981).
The 19th-century Japanese cup at left, produced by the Setsuzando studio, shows a crescent moon. The 17th-century manuscript page showing Shiva and Parvati meeting in a forest setting has moons and stars scattered everywhere.
The pictures above might not necessarily include every bit of astronomical imagery that can be found in the Cincinnati Art Museum, but they include a lot of it. Now, by way of comparison, let us first look at astronomical imagery in
THE MARKET SQUARE:
The San Antonio Market Square is full of art—religious art, colorful art, even cheesy T-shirt art!
Within the Market Square, images of the sun and the moon abound.
In some places, these images fill up an entire wall.
This row of suns was eye-catching.
Stars are not absent from the Market Square, either.
More suns, together with The Crucifixion.
These pictures definitely do not include every bit of astronomical imagery that can be found in the San Antonio Market Square—not even close. When it came to astronomical imagery, the Market Square beat the Art Museum easily.