Tag Archives: Brother Guy Consolmagno

From the Tablet: Tales of Earthlings

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This entry is part 35 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

Along with my regular Tablet columns I am asked on occasion to write other articles for them. This one was run in August, 2005, just before the annual World Science Fiction Convention that was held that year in Glasgow. It ran again here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015. This year, the Worldcon will be held August 16-20 in San Jose. I’ll be there, too. When I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) I belonged to the Science Fiction Society, the “MITSFS”. We had a motto: “We’re not Fans, we just read the stuff.” There was an element of self-parody, of course; if we weren’t fans, why would we pay our dues to belong to a club of “misfits”? (Because the club had a room full of books – some 30,000 SF novels and related material – and comfy chairs, a welcome hideaway on campus.) But the motto also recognized an uncomfortable truth. Even at MIT, science fiction … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: All of the Above

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This entry is part 34 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in August, 2005. It first ran at The Catholic Astronomer in August, 2015 [During a weekend in August, 2005] while over a million young people were gathered in Germany to celebrate World Youth Day with the Pope, a hundred and thirty kids from Detroit were taking part in a parallel camp-out organized by the Archdiocese on the grounds of a small farm in the Thumb of Michigan. (The lower peninsula of my home state, Michigan, is shaped like a mitten, and I grew up on the peninsula jutting into Lake Huron that makes up the mitten’s thumb. Readers of a certain age may remember a British pop band who found a town at the Thumb’s base by sticking a pin into a map and thereby called themselves the Bay City Rollers.) “Turn left onto a dirt road, and look for a pond and a red barn,” read my directions. Every barn in Michigan is … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Tom Swift and his Helium Pycnometer

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This entry is part 29 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

  This column first ran in The Tablet in July, 2004…and again, here, in 2015 Looking over my shoulder at the computer screen, Bob Macke starts telling me about a cartoon he’d seen on an office door at MIT. ‘The first panel,’ he says, ‘was a guy labeled “cartoon scientist,” surrounded by boiling test-tubes and sparking electrical equipment, shouting that he’s discovered the Elixir of Life. The second panel, labeled “real scientists,” was just a bunch of people looking at a computer screen, and one says to the other, “I think our data point should be plotted in red.”’ I give him a dirty look. Two keystrokes later, and our data points are now plotted in red. It’s two weeks before I leave for the annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society, and I’m busy trying to prepare three papers. One is a collaboration with a colleague in Pennsylvania. I’ve posted a rough draft of our paper on a web page … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: By Paper, to the Stars

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This entry is part 181 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in June, 2004, and first published here in 2015… read the end to find out what happened! The people who design airplanes say that a plane can’t fly until its weight is matched by the weight of its paperwork. The same must be true for launching spacecraft to another planet. Last month [May 2004] I took part on a NASA panel in Washington DC, reviewing five competing plans to build a planetary probe; in the run-up to the panel I was shipped 30 pounds of paper to read. NASA’s “New Frontiers” program is a development of another project driven by piles of paperwork: the Solar System Decadal Survey commissioned by NASA and executed by the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. After hearing from hundreds of planetary scientists at meetings around the world (and reading white papers solicited and gathered by various international  societies) a committee of graybeards outlined where NASA should be … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Ordinary Time

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This entry is part 180 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in June, 2006, and re-run in 2015 here. The coincidence of the church calendar it mentions is also true this year, 2018… the text has been slightly altered to align it with 2018’s calendar. The work detailed here outlines what I was doing twelve years ago. An update appears at the end of the column.) Next weekend marks an unusual event in our recent Church calendar: a Sunday in “Ordinary Time.” What with Lent and the Easter season, and then the special Feasts of the Trinity and Corpus Christi, Ordinary Time has been rare lately. But I’ve been celebrating “ordinary time” at the Vatican Observatory as well. Unusual for me, I’ve actually been able to manage a month’s uninterrupted work in my laboratory. My airline’s frequent flyer program tells me I’ve flown over 27,000 miles since the last ordinary Sunday before Lent: an observing run at the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, a meeting … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: DIY Religion

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This entry is part 179 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in May, 2005; we ran it here at the blog in 2015 Astronomy pulls you out of your day to day world and makes you realize that the universe has bigger questions than “what’s for dinner?” and “why is my boss such a pain?” But what does an astronomer do to pull himself out of a day-to-day already filled with galaxies and black holes? In January, 2005, I began a Jesuit program called Tertianship, a period of study and prayer leading up to final vows where I’ve been challenged to move outside my own familiar modes of spirituality, to work outside my comfort zone. For me, that has meant working with people. For six weeks in May, 2005, I lived at Santa Clara University, talking religion to engineers and scientists in Silicon Valley. The pattern of religious life for these “techies” is familiar: Students are consumed by questions about ultimate truth and the meaning of their own … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Tending Towards Paganism

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This entry is part 175 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column for The Tablet first ran in May 2006; we first ran it here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015. It has been one of the more popular postings… “Believing that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism,” proclaimed a Scottish newspaper earlier this month [2006], citing as its authority no less than “the Vatican Astronomer, Guy Consolmagno.” I was as surprised as anyone; though I do worry that creationism can tend towards paganism, I don’t remember being so blunt. Well, he was careful not to put those words into quotation marks. But even if it is an accurate statement of what I believe, does it qualify as news? I’m not a theologian, much less a spokesperson for the Vatican. I’m an astronomer who happens to be a Jesuit, who happens to work at the Vatican. Of course, I have my opinions on matters of theology, but are they any more newsworthy than the … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: The Ethics of Extraterrestrials

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This entry is part 174 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This article first appeared in The Tablet in April, 2004; we first ran it here at the Catholic Astronomer in 2015 Astrobiology, so the joke goes, is like theology: an academic discipline where highly educated people argue for years about a subject no one can prove exists. It’s been around a long time under a variety of different names – exobiology, bioastronomy – but only when NASA decided a few years ago that the search for life was a winning strategy to get funding did the field start to get more than begrudging respect. And so, the last week of March [2004], I joined more than 700 scientists gathering at the NASA Ames Research Center for the fourth Astrobiology Science Conference. The setting was both inspiring and cautionary. NASA Ames is located at the old Moffett Field Naval Air Station in California’s Silicon Valley: our meeting was in a large tent in the shadow of the enormous hangers built in the 1930s … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Science as Story

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This entry is part 169 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

Originally published in The Tablet in March, 2007, and again here in 2015… this version is slightly edited. The late Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard biologist and popular science writer, once described the roles of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” – they should not be in conflict because they never come in contact. I could see his point; as cases from Galileo to Dawkins have shown, authority in one field rarely translates into authority in the other. But as those same cases also demonstrate, science and religion do overlap all the time in at least one locus: in the human being, who chooses how to live in a world that has both science and religion. Indeed, the same is true of all the worlds each of us live in: our politics, school, favorite music, social background, sports teams, family. We all have our homes in each of those fields. I felt caught up in such a web back in 2007 when a friend … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Fire and Ice

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This entry is part 168 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

Originally published in The Tablet in March, 2006, and republished here in 2015. This version is slightly edited. The 2006 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held outside the Johnson Space Center in Houston, was unusually rich. We saw fiery dust from an ice-rich comet; startling images from Mars; a new type of lunar rock… and that was just on Monday morning. By Friday afternoon, I was exhausted. I had already heard the Stardust results (see Across the Universe) at the Sunday welcome cocktail party when one of the mission scientists whispered to me, “We’ve found CAIs!” (Another friend on the team described Stardust Principle Scientist Don Brownlee’s first comment when they finally got the samples: “I can’t believe it actually worked!”) These high-temperature grains of Calcium and Aluminum oxides that appear as Inclusions in certain meteorites are thought to represent the first solid materials to crystallize out from the hot gases that made the sun and planets. How did they … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: The Art of Science

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This entry is part 166 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in March 2017 What do you tell a room of bright young high school science students? That has been my challenge recently, visiting Jesuit high schools across North America. Pope Leo XIII wanted the Vatican Observatory to show the world how the Church supports science; while the other Jesuits have been doing the science, I’ve been “showing the world”. The hardest but most important message for these students to hear is the need to look beyond the math and sciences they love, to treasure as well other course work that they might find more difficult to appreciate. Unlike in Britain, schools in America are less likely to narrow their focus purely into “arts” or “sciences” tracks, but the students themselves may well gravitate into the sciences because they feel awkward in the disciplines where they feel less talented. Science is a field of exciting ideas; but it’s the arts that provide an essential … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Pearls among swine

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This entry is part 165 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

First published in The Tablet in February, 2006 Long rows of weedy plastic motel rooms spring up in the hard barren sands of the desert surrounding Tucson, their walls scoured by the creosote-scented winds and stripped of color by the relentless sun. In winter the surrounding asphalt seas shine with fleets of cars fleeing the cold of the north. The invasion reaches its peak in the first two weeks of February. That’s when the downtown Tucson convention centre, the main ballrooms of the larger hotels, and every motel within miles (plus more discreet, upscale shows in outlying resort regions) are filled with tens of thousands of rock hounds and gem dealers attending the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show: the largest in the world. Tents in parking lots arch over tables covered with fossils from Morocco and rich ores from Argentina. Within the motels themselves, each room becomes a little shop. Walking down the hallways – or, more commonly in Tucson, … Continue reading →