Inside God's Observatory: Special The Sky at Night


Inside God's Observatory: Special

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Today, The Sky At Night comes from the heart of one of the most

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influential organisations in the history of astronomy,

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but also one of the most surprising.

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Welcome to the Vatican.

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BELL TOLLS

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This is St Peter's in the heart of the Vatican,

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the headquarters of the Catholic Church for centuries.

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When the Pope speaks from the balcony behind me,

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there can be up to half a million people

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gathered in the square to hear him.

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But the Vatican is so much more than a man and a square.

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It's a city-state with a population of about 1,000,

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and it's the centre of a global organisation

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with over a billion followers.

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But the headquarters of the Catholic Church also hides a secret.

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This is home to the Vatican Observatory,

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and astronomers here have played

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a major role in science over the centuries.

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It's funded to the tune of over 1 million a year

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with a dozen priest scientists

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operating telescopes in Italy and the United States.

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The Vatican is truly a serious player in the field of astronomy.

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Tonight, we are in Italy to explore

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the rich and varied world of Vatican astronomy.

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It's a shame if you're a religious person

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but you've closed your eyes to science.

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From Galileo to modern, cutting-edge science...

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..we'll investigate the priest who revolutionised stellar astronomy.

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And unearth new scientific revelations

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from an old photographic star map.

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And we'll discover how the Vatican

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is trying to explain creation itself.

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But first, Maggie finds out how one of the world's largest religious

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organisations got mixed up in astronomy in the first place.

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This is the Meridian Hall in the Tower of the Winds.

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It's perched above one of the great rooms of the Vatican.

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With its murals of ancient Romans,

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the Hall looks a bit like a stately home.

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But unknown to most, back in the 16th century,

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this room had a very different function...

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..which you can only get an inkling of in the dark.

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It's all a bit Dan Brown or Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

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This is what it's all about.

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At noon, a beam of sunlight bursts through that hole at the top of the

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wall and projects onto the floor.

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It was cloudy while we were here,

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but this amateur footage shows the spot on the floor.

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It tells us something fascinating.

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This whole room is actually a very accurate sundial.

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And it was built in 1580

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to help resolve something they didn't understand.

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Significant astronomical events, like the solstice and the equinoxes,

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were occurring earlier and earlier in the year.

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The calendar they'd used for millennia wasn't working.

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By the 16th century, the calendar was nearly two weeks out.

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The spring equinox was occurring on the 10th of March rather than around

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the 21st of March, where it had started.

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And every year, it was getting more and more out of kilter.

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It was obvious that the number of days in the calendar year

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didn't match the passage of the seasons -

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the true astronomical year.

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The calendar was out.

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The question was, how much?

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So, to illustrate the drift, the Pope built this sundial.

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Every day at noon, when the sun was at its highest,

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a spot of light was projected on the floor.

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As the year progressed, the height of the Sun changed,

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so the position of the spot moved, too.

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Recording this change meant priests could work out exactly

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where the spot would land at noon on the astronomical equinox.

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Here.

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Now they could compare the astronomical date of the equinox

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with the calendar date.

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This enabled them to work out exactly how far the calendar

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had slipped and exactly how long a year actually was

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and finally get the calendar back on track.

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After seven years of diligent study,

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Pope Gregory XIII concluded that the real length of a year was

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365.2425 days.

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And to get the calendar back on track, he took drastic action.

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He removed ten days from the calendar.

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Suddenly, the day after the 4th of October was the 15th of October!

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He had created the Gregorian calendar that we use today,

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and something else, too.

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It signalled a new papal interest in the scientific workings

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of the stars and the planets, in astronomy.

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But the Vatican's hope for a fruitful relationship with science

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was soon to flounder.

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After the success of Pope Gregory's calendar in 1582,

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things went horribly wrong.

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A certain scientist came up with an idea that was so controversial

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that it shook the Catholic Church for centuries to come.

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I'm talking, of course, of Galileo Galilei.

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Galileo got into trouble by promoting an idea

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that's utterly commonplace today -

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that the sun is the centre of the solar system.

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He did that in books like this one.

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This is his Dialogue On The Two Chief World Systems,

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not an original copy,

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but what the Vatican told us was a modern Latin translation from 1699.

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Having the sun at the centre of the universe, heliocentricism,

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actually appeared in the works of Copernicus

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a generation before Galileo.

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And for many years, it was uncontroversial,

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taught even here at the Vatican as a useful mathematical device.

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But nearly a century later, Galileo found himself in a Vatican court,

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just for defending his beliefs.

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To discover why, Maggie talked to the director of the Vatican Observatory,

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Brother Guy Consolmagno, in one of the Vatican's many libraries.

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So, what was Galileo actually tried for?

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Good question. You read the trial and the only thing they discuss is

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whether or not he obeyed the adjunction

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he had gotten 20 years earlier to

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not push the Copernican system, which he obviously was pushing.

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But he said,

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"If there's any place you want me to change

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"so I don't do that in my book, I'll be free to change it."

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And they kept saying, "No, no, we have to find you guilty of something."

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Then they tried out a verdict that has nothing to do

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with what they talked about, saying, "We found you guilty of heresy."

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And he said, "No, you didn't, you haven't found any of..."

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So they change it to, "We found you guilty of vehement suspicion of heresy,"

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which is kind of an odd thing to be guilty of.

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So we've got this old system but, after a while, with Newton's work,

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we embrace the new system, we've got evidence now.

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And so the Church embraced the idea?

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It did, actually. By the 1750s,

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only 20 years after Newton's final edition, they said

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it's OK to teach the Copernican system, not just as mathematics,

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but as a way of explaining the universe,

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with the one exception that Galileo's book

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was still on the index where you needed permission to read it.

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-It's just human nature, they didn't want to admit they were wrong.

-Yes.

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But they didn't admit they were wrong for a long time.

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Well, about Galileo, they took it off the index in about 1820,

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and they are kind of embarrassed it was still on by then,

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nobody had noticed.

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The interesting thing that happened in 1992,

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Pope John Paul II said

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let's go back and have the Church admit it was wrong,

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not just in what it said about Galileo,

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but the very fact that Galileo went on trial.

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I mean, they got Galileo on a technicality.

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He really did push the Copernican system

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-the way he'd promised he wasn't going to.

-Yes.

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And he was guilty of that, but that's not the point.

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The point is they shouldn't have tried him for it.

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And so Pope John Paul II apologised publicly to Galileo

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for having put him on trial.

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Naturally, people are going to read that,

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"Oh, finally the Church accepts the Copernican..."

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No, no. We'd been teaching that for a few hundred years.

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Despite the Galileo incident,

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the Vatican continued its interest in astronomy.

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And within a hundred years,

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they'd built a new observatory within the Vatican walls

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and its reputation soon began to grow.

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The next crucial part of the story of Vatican astronomy

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takes place in the 19th century here at the Church of Sant'Ignazio

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in the centre of Rome.

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It was here that a new way of looking at the universe

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was developed, and it's one that's still important to astronomy today.

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This is Father Angelo Secchi,

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a Jesuit priest and a passionate astronomer.

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He ran the Vatican Observatory for 30 years,

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helping turn it into a world-class

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scientific and astronomical institution.

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He oversaw its move in 1853 from inside the Vatican walls to a larger

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facility on the roof of this church...

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..one large enough to house the most modern of telescopes.

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With his state-of-the-art observatory,

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he started a new and unique project,

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and he began to see the stars in a way

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that no-one had ever done before.

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Secchi's innovation was to organise the stars into groups,

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and he used their light to classify them.

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And the secret to Secchi's classification was the development of something

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called spectroscopy.

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Spectroscopy was first discovered by Isaac Newton when he observed that a

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beam of light can be split into a spectrum.

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But later, scientists noticed that those spectra

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often contained dark lines.

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And those lines hold unique information about what the source of

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the light was made of.

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Secchi's genius, though, was to use this new tool on the stars.

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His results showed that each star has a distinctive pattern of lines.

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And Secchi used these patterns to sort the stars

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into four separate groups.

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His system inspired the way that we classify the stars today...

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..and we now know that the lines in the spectra that he was seeing

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identify elements in the stars.

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That's why this is still such a useful tool.

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On the roof of Secchi's old observatory,

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'I met Father David Brown,

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'who works with the Vatican's current spectroscopy group

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'at their telescope in Arizona.'

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Oh, wow!

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This is where Secchi did his spectroscopy.

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What does modern spectroscopy tell us?

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Essentially the idea's still the same.

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What has changed would be the technology.

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So what does a modern spectrum look like?

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This would be an example right over here of a modern spectrum.

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This right over here would indicate the wavelength.

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This would be the amount of light at each different wavelength.

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If you can see right over here these small dips in the curve,

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this would indicate the presence of certain elements that are absorbing

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certain types of wavelength right there.

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So that's what we sometimes see as these black lines

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-in the rainbow spectrum?

-Exactly, exactly.

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Yeah, I guess this is labelled as magnesium here and iron

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-and some other things.

-Iron right there, yes.

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Father Brown and his team use modern spectroscopy to research

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a strange type of star which has defied classification.

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The middle one right over here is part of what we're doing

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actually at the observatory, what is known as a Lambda Boo star.

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These are stars that have a certain dearth of what are known

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as iron peak elements, so that would be elements

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right around the mass of an iron atom,

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so cobalt, nickel, magnesium.

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Yeah, and you can see there's the magnesium line

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that's disappeared here almost entirely.

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Exactly, and so the work centres on observing these types of stars

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and of course asking the question, well, why?

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These are generally stars of the same spectral type.

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Why do their spectra differ?

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One particular hypothesis is that

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such Lambda Boo stars are able to create matter,

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-circumstellar matter...

-Just leftover material?

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Exactly, exactly.

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..onto themselves and this particular type of matter would be...

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type of gas would be metal-poor.

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And so that type of gas falling onto the star would serve to dilute the

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-concentration...

-Oh, so you sort of temporarily hide

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-the underlying atmosphere.

-Exactly, exactly.

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-Because of that.

-Fascinating.

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The fact that you can see that in the spectrum,

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I think Secchi would have been proud of that.

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Very much. He would have been fascinated by something like this,

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and certainly very happy that his work, in many ways,

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has continued at the successor to his observatory.

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Secchi's work launched a golden age of Vatican astronomical research.

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And we're travelling 30 kilometres south of the Vatican

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to the home of that research.

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Castel Gandolfo - the Pope's summer palace.

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Here, Pope Pius XI built a new observatory

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free from the glare of Rome.

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Today, it's where half a dozen priest scientists live and work,

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and it's home to four telescopes.

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One of these telescopes was at the heart of what was in its day

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one of the biggest science projects in the world,

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a project that would dominate astronomy for over 50 years...

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..the Carte du Ciel, the first photographic map of the whole sky.

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By the end of the 19th century,

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astronomers had realised that photographic plates

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could register thousands of new stars invisible to the human eye.

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And they could use them to create a new kind of map of the stars.

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The Vatican contributed 2,000 plates to the project.

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'They're curated by Father Alessandro Omizzolo.'

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Can you tell me, what was the goal of the project Carte du Ciel?

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The goal was double.

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The first one was to have a photographic map of the whole sky.

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-The entire sky?

-Yes.

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This project...

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..was proposed to the observatories of the Lord

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and so the Pope decided that the Vatican astronomers

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should be involved in this scientific enterprise

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because the aim of the Vatican Observatory

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was to do astronomy as the professional astronomers do.

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These are some of the plates. Now, what's special about this plate?

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This is the first plate.

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The first plate taken here?

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Not only here. All over the world.

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Wow! The first plate for the whole project?

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The first plate of the Carte du Ciel project.

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It is...

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It was taken...

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..August 8, 1891.

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The plates revealed a wealth of new stars previously too faint to see

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and incredible details of other objects, too, like Halley's Comet.

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Father Alessandro, how many stars appeared on each plate?

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With the Carte du Ciel plates,

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we have magnitudes up to 14, so perhaps...

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-..1,000.

-OK.

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-But no more.

-How many plates were generated across the project?

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Every telescope generated 2,000 plates.

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That's a lot of data.

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Yes, a lot of data.

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So, how was the data processed?

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The data...

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processed by three nuns.

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-Three nuns?

-Yes.

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-Just three?

-Three.

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So these three nuns worked a lot,

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many years to get the position of the stars

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and also the magnitude of the stars.

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In the last few years,

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scientists have renewed their interest in this data.

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The European Space Agency launched the telescopes Hipparcos and Gaia

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to map the galaxy.

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Comparing those results to the Carte du Ciel images

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might reveal how the sky has changed over a hundred years.

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The Vatican Observatory decide about 20 years ago

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to digitise every plate, so to preserve the information

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but also to offer the possibility to international community

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of the astronomers to access this data,

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to compare the position of the stars from the Carte du Ciel project

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with the position of the same star from Hipparcos or Gaia.

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I think it's a fantastic project but really exciting that data gathered

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100 years ago is still relevant today and can be compared with data

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we're getting today and tell us things.

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-Yes.

-Tell us new things.

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-Yes.

-So thank you very much, it's a brilliant project.

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Thanks to you.

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Castel Gandolfo is the largest Vatican territory,

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larger than its base in Rome and all of its embassies.

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And it's stunning.

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Because of its beauty,

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it's hard for me to imagine that within these walls,

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cutting-edge physics is actually happening.

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If there's one scientific problem that you would expect

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the Catholic Church to be working on, it's the problem of creation,

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how the universe got started in the first place.

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And in fact, the details of what we'd call the Big Bang theory

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were first worked out by a Belgian Catholic priest

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called George Lemaitre.

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Father George Lemaitre was a contemporary of Einstein's

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and was one of the first to come up with the vision

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of the universe that we understand today.

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He realised that Einstein's theories suggested that the universe could be

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expanding, an idea spectacularly confirmed in the 1920s through

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measurements of distant galaxies.

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But this idea also suggests that if you wind back time,

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you arrive at a moment when the universe

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must have been a single point.

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And that point is what we now call the Big Bang.

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Today, over 100 years after Lemaitre's work,

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physicists are trying to understand the very first moment of the

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universe's life.

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That moment is known as the Planck era.

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And it's so strange that during it the two great theories of physics,

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quantum mechanics and general relativity, break down.

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Many scientists, including some here at the Vatican Observatory,

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are now trying to come up with a new theory that combines the two -

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quantum gravity.

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Their approach is controversial

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because it tweaks the fundamentals of gravity itself.

0:20:470:20:51

When we say Big Bang, we mean that hot, dense state

0:20:530:20:56

-and also the moment at the beginning.

-Beginning, yes.

0:20:560:21:00

-Yeah.

-Let's talk about the dense state first.

0:21:000:21:02

So what physics is happening?

0:21:030:21:05

What can we say about the laws that govern the universe

0:21:050:21:08

right back at the beginning?

0:21:080:21:09

So that's a billionth, billionth, billionth, billionth,

0:21:290:21:33

and then a few bits more.

0:21:330:21:35

So tell me about your work.

0:21:450:21:47

What's your approach to try and solve these problems?

0:21:470:21:49

That's the strength of gravity.

0:22:230:22:25

Which we assume is the same everywhere in the universe.

0:22:250:22:28

At that early time.

0:22:360:22:37

So the idea is you play with things

0:22:550:22:57

you would normally leave alone to try and get

0:22:570:22:59

a theory that works at this early time.

0:22:590:23:02

Early time, exactly.

0:23:020:23:03

And then I guess you've got to do something to make

0:23:030:23:05

it work later in the universe so it becomes the gravity we see.

0:23:050:23:09

Thank you very much.

0:23:260:23:27

It's thrilling stuff.

0:23:290:23:30

But, like all the work we've seen being done here

0:23:320:23:34

at the Vatican Observatory, it does beg a question.

0:23:340:23:37

Why are they doing it at all?

0:23:390:23:40

Chris met with the Observatory's director, Brother Guy Consolmagno,

0:23:420:23:46

to talk about the relationship between astronomy and religion.

0:23:460:23:50

So, Brother Guy, thank you for having us

0:23:500:23:52

in this rather wonderful place.

0:23:520:23:55

It's great to show it off.

0:23:550:23:56

-I just love it.

-Yeah. I guess my question is why are you here?

0:23:560:23:59

Why does the Vatican have astronomers?

0:23:590:24:02

Why does anybody have astronomers?

0:24:020:24:03

You know, a friend of mine says

0:24:030:24:05

it's because we couldn't afford a particle accelerator.

0:24:050:24:07

Why does anybody do astronomy?

0:24:090:24:10

It's not going to make you rich, it's not going to make you famous,

0:24:100:24:13

it's not going to get you girls, didn't work for me.

0:24:130:24:15

So why do we do astronomy?

0:24:150:24:18

I had no answer for that when I was a postdoc at MIT,

0:24:180:24:22

and I quit and I joined the Peace Corps and went off to Africa.

0:24:220:24:25

And the Africans were fascinated with astronomy.

0:24:250:24:27

The Africans wanted to know why did we go to the moon,

0:24:270:24:30

what was it like when we got there?

0:24:300:24:32

They wanted to look through my telescope

0:24:320:24:34

and when they saw the rings of Saturn they went, "Wow!"

0:24:340:24:36

And that's when I realised that we don't live by bread alone.

0:24:360:24:41

Astronomy is one of those places where we can ask

0:24:410:24:44

the bigger questions than just "What's for lunch?"

0:24:440:24:47

I guess people...

0:24:470:24:48

..are surprised that somebody of deep religious faith

0:24:500:24:53

can be a scientist and I'm trying to think why that is

0:24:530:24:56

and here's what I've come up with.

0:24:560:24:58

-OK.

-I think what it is is that...

0:24:580:25:00

..in science, it's all about creating simple answers, right?

0:25:010:25:05

So as a physicist, I'm not allowed to invent 600 reasons why a star is

0:25:050:25:11

misbehaving or why a planet behaves in a particular way,

0:25:110:25:13

-I have to find the simple answer.

-Right.

0:25:130:25:15

And you seem to do that and then invent or add God to that.

0:25:150:25:21

-Yeah.

-God is not necessary, I think.

0:25:210:25:23

Oh, and that's of course a complete misunderstanding,

0:25:230:25:26

really of what science is, that a lot of people have.

0:25:260:25:28

I put it a different way.

0:25:280:25:30

People think there's the big book of science with all the science answers

0:25:300:25:33

and the big book of religion with all the religion answers and,

0:25:330:25:35

"Oh, my gosh, what happens if they don't agree?"

0:25:350:25:37

But science is not the book of answers,

0:25:370:25:40

it's the conversation that you and I have about the answers.

0:25:400:25:44

And the conversation can go on forever

0:25:440:25:46

because we'll never get to the bottom

0:25:460:25:48

of understanding how those bits fit together.

0:25:480:25:51

The religion side is not, "These are the answers,"

0:25:510:25:55

but rather, "This is how we've experienced God.

0:25:550:25:58

"See if you can find that experience, that same God,

0:25:580:26:02

"when you experience the data."

0:26:020:26:05

I want to come back to this idea of sort of questions

0:26:050:26:07

which are approached philosophically, where the questions

0:26:070:26:10

don't go away and you sort of gain

0:26:100:26:12

new insight by thinking about them again and again,

0:26:120:26:14

versus sort of scientific questions,

0:26:140:26:17

where the idea is to solve that and get a new question

0:26:170:26:19

and sort of take the next ticket and keep grinding out.

0:26:190:26:22

How do you decide which question falls in which category?

0:26:220:26:26

Some are obvious. You know, I want to know what spectrum Sirius has,

0:26:260:26:29

-that's scientific.

-Yes, exactly.

-But if I want to know why death exists...

0:26:290:26:33

Isn't there a grey area in the middle?

0:26:330:26:35

Absolutely, and that's why it's not a solved problem.

0:26:350:26:39

That's why it's not something that you can have a computer do for you.

0:26:390:26:42

You can't work out a calculus of ethics.

0:26:430:26:46

People tried. It's always a disaster.

0:26:460:26:48

And you have to remember that religion is not

0:26:480:26:50

in the business of answering questions,

0:26:500:26:52

religion is in the business of suggesting questions.

0:26:520:26:56

So religion and science are both on this road between truth and

0:26:560:26:58

understanding but, you know, it's a two-way road.

0:26:580:27:01

And it's a shame if you only have the one and not the other.

0:27:010:27:05

It's a shame if you're a religious person but you've closed your eyes

0:27:050:27:08

to science, because you've closed your eyes to this incredibly rich

0:27:080:27:12

way of experiencing the Creator.

0:27:120:27:16

Well, I'm glad that we are and I'm glad we sorted some of this out.

0:27:160:27:19

-Thank you very much.

-I don't think we'll ever sort it out

0:27:190:27:21

-but we'll have a lot of fun talking about it.

-Thank you very much.

0:27:210:27:24

However you might feel about the overlap between science and religion,

0:27:290:27:33

the Vatican Observatory has been a fascinating place to visit.

0:27:330:27:37

It's always wonderful getting access to a new observatory

0:27:370:27:40

but I found this trip quite surprising.

0:27:400:27:42

I was surprised at the rich history that the Vatican Observatory has.

0:27:420:27:46

But you'd think there'd be some conflict

0:27:460:27:48

between a religious organisation working in science,

0:27:480:27:51

but I've seen no evidence of that at all.

0:27:510:27:53

Just people really enjoying their work.

0:27:530:27:55

And for me, it's been a nice reminder that the quest

0:27:550:27:57

to understand the universe is something truly international,

0:27:570:28:00

something everyone can take part in, no matter where they're from.

0:28:000:28:04

That's it for tonight, but do join us next month,

0:28:040:28:06

where we'll be looking to the very edges of the solar system

0:28:060:28:09

to find out what lurks out there.

0:28:090:28:11

And remember to check out the star guide on our website

0:28:110:28:13

to find out what's happening in the night sky during June.

0:28:130:28:17

And don't forget, in the meantime, get outside and get looking up.

0:28:170:28:21

Goodnight.

0:28:210:28:22

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