Tag Archives: faith and science

Reflections on the passing of Fr. George Coyne

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This entry is part 49 of 57 in the series Diary

I am back now from Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY, where the funeral of Fr. George Coyne was held on Monday. First, I thought I would share here a couple of items that showed the respect Fr. Coyne had both in the world at large and at Le Moyne College. To begin, here’s a copy of the obituary as run in the Sunday New York Times on February 16: While I was at Le Moyne, I was given a tour of the science building and found that George was mentioned both on their “wall of Jesuit sciences” and on a large poster in a passageway between buildings on campus: Finally, two more items I want to publish here are a cleaned-up version of the comments that I was invited to give at the funeral, and the remarks that the president of Le Moyne, Dr. Linda LeMura Reflections on the life of a Jesuit Astronomer, Br Guy Consolmagno, Vatican Observatory … Continue reading →

The ancient and inaccessible: the moon and the periodic table

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Next week I am off to St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) to give an invited lecture at the 4th International Conference on the Periodic Table — a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Dmitri Mendeleev’s proposal that the chemical elements could be laid out in a table where elements in each row (now columns) shared many properties. This periodicity of properties led this method of organization to be called a “periodic table.” Pope Paul VI in one of the Vatican Observatory’s domes reading a message to the Apollo 11 astronauts. The lecture I’ve been asked to give is based on an essay I wrote for Nature Chemistry earlier this year, “Isotopic Enrichment” (Isotopes are variants on elements. For example, carbon-14 dating tracks the radioactive decay of a heavier than normal variant of a carbon atom.  Most carbon is carbon-12, where the number indicates the mass of a single atom,) The title of this blog post comes from an article ten years ago in … Continue reading →

ⓜ Why Br Guy is home in bed, exhausted… Diary of 15 June, 2019

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This entry is part 41 of 57 in the series Diary

It’s no joke, alas; I am under doctor’s orders to stay home, and go to bed when I am tired (which is most of the time), after having cancelled half of my events scheduled for June. That, under the orders of several friends who are doctors and several other friends who are genuine and certified Jewish Mothers! First, the business: I did a brief update in May showing 129 subscribers and on April 16 we had a reach of 8465 readers. Well, as of today, we have 131 paid subscribers and 8701 people who get notified of new postings. We continue to grow, but not nearly fast enough to keep us in business. Please tell more people about our site; and if you can, please subscribe at a rate of $10 a month (that’s two visits to Dunkin Donuts for me) or $100 per year. That’s also no joke. As for the exhaustion… read on! Let’s just outline what I’ll … Continue reading →

IAU Adds Lemaître’s Name to Hubble Law

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This year marked my first opportunity to attend a general assembly of the International Astronomical Union.  It was an exciting two weeks in which scientists from all branches of astronomy and space physics gathered in beautiful Vienna, Austria to discuss their research and to do the work of the IAU.  Walking around the meeting venue, one could see astronomers of all stripes, from all over the world, and occasionally one could catch a glimpse of one of the “Big Names” in astronomy wandering about, usually in heated discussion with others about some important topic or other. What makes the IAU different from other scientific meetings is that it serves as the governing body for those aspects of astronomy that require universal agreement, such as the naming of stars and asteroids or of features on planets and moons.  It was the IAU that famously voted in 2006 to change the definition of a planet, which resulted in the “demotion” of Pluto … Continue reading →

An interfaith fellowship on religion and science

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This entry is part 2 of 57 in the series Diary

It comes in the mail… This might be very interesting to the readers of our blog… with Rabbi Geoff Mitelman’s permission, I am posting here his email to me: I’m writing to you because my organization, Sinai and Synapses, bridges the worlds of religion and science, and aims to elevate the public discourse in general. We have just opened applications for an interfaith Fellowship on religion and science, where we will bring together a select group of academics, clergy and writers for learning, networking and content creation in New York six times over two years. Through a generous grant, we will also be able to cover travel for all the meetings, (within North America). We want to make sure we have a diverse collection of Fellows, so I wondered if you might know people who would be good candidates to apply, or even if you could share it in your networks. Obviously, we can’t promise anything, since we don’t know how many … Continue reading →

Faith and Science: One Stop Shopping!

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This entry is part 20 of 57 in the series Diary

We’re pleased to announce the latest outreach project of the Vatican Observatory Foundation: A Faith and Science resource site (click here!) The idea is to have a place where Catholic educators – and educated Catholics – can go to find links to materials all over the web dealing with a variety of topics on the broad issue of Faith and Science. This web site is not complete, of course, and probably never will be… new material is being posted (and being brought to our attention) all the time. In fact, when you go to the site you’ll notice a certain bias towards material that our own members of the Vatican Observatory, past and present, have prepared and posted on-line. Rather than describing it further, I encourage you to go explore the site itself. And if you have comments or suggestions, please let us know. However, there’s one point I do want to make here. Sites like these don’t happen for … Continue reading →

Catholicism, Evolution, and Intelligent Design: What is the Relationship?

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Growing up as a Catholic youth in the 80’s and 90’s meant my vision of Catholicism was profoundly shaped by St. John Paul II. Whether it be camping out in Denver’s Cherry Creek Park at World Youth Day or trying to read his dense, philosophical writings, it seemed that almost every word that came from JPII’s mouth became the backdrop for how to interpret Jesus Christ and the Church. I emphasize the phrase “almost every word” because two areas of his writing that were not universally embraced were Catholic Social Teaching and Evolution. Though some argue over the intent of St. John Paul II’s statements about evolution in his 1996 Message on Evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the fact remains that he affirmed Pius XII’s teaching from Humani Generis that evolution is not in conflict with Church teaching as long as evolution is restricted to the material origin of ours bodies, affirming that the soul is created by God alone. (paragraph 36) When … Continue reading →