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Greeks, Romans and Catholics
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2006 Mar 14, 09:56 -0800
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2006 Mar 14, 09:56 -0800
In our discussion of Ptolemy and helio- vs geo-centric universes, Galileo is often mentioned. He is, of course, famous for being threatened with excommunication by the Catholic church if he didn't recant his theories about the universe being heliocentric. Fast forward a few centuries: Don't know how many are aware of this, but the Vatican has supported its own observatory for the last century or so. No, not still trying to dispute Galileo (they learned their lesson on that one), but trying to advance astronomy. A friend of mine who is an avid amateur astronomer and an executive at Hewlett Packard is on their Board of Directors. As a result he has arranged a number of talks by members of the observatory as they visit the San Francisco Bay area. They have offices in both Italy and Arizona, with their own 1.2m telescope observatory among the cluster of observatories atop mountains in the Phoenix area. They do mostly planetary astronomy. Most of their staff are men who have PhD's in astronomy and who then decide to enter religious orders. The head of the observatory, George Coyne, SJ (a vigorous man in his late 60s who still jogs 5 miles a day) has "spies" who look for these sorts of folks and recruits them for the Observatory. The size of the group is so small (about a dozen) that getting scope time is no problem, leading several Phoenix-area university astronomers to quip "Unlimited scope time and all I have to do is give up sex? Where do I sign up?"Anyway, if you're interested, see more at www.vaticanobservatory.org Lu Abel
