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Today, The Sky At Night comes from the heart of one of the most | 0:00:02 | 0:00:04 | |
influential organisations in the history of astronomy, | 0:00:04 | 0:00:06 | |
but also one of the most surprising. | 0:00:06 | 0:00:09 | |
Welcome to the Vatican. | 0:00:09 | 0:00:10 | |
BELL TOLLS | 0:00:39 | 0:00:40 | |
This is St Peter's in the heart of the Vatican, | 0:00:47 | 0:00:50 | |
the headquarters of the Catholic Church for centuries. | 0:00:50 | 0:00:53 | |
When the Pope speaks from the balcony behind me, | 0:00:53 | 0:00:55 | |
there can be up to half a million people | 0:00:55 | 0:00:57 | |
gathered in the square to hear him. | 0:00:57 | 0:00:59 | |
But the Vatican is so much more than a man and a square. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:02 | |
It's a city-state with a population of about 1,000, | 0:01:03 | 0:01:07 | |
and it's the centre of a global organisation | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
with over a billion followers. | 0:01:10 | 0:01:12 | |
But the headquarters of the Catholic Church also hides a secret. | 0:01:12 | 0:01:16 | |
This is home to the Vatican Observatory, | 0:01:16 | 0:01:19 | |
and astronomers here have played | 0:01:19 | 0:01:20 | |
a major role in science over the centuries. | 0:01:20 | 0:01:23 | |
It's funded to the tune of over 1 million a year | 0:01:23 | 0:01:26 | |
with a dozen priest scientists | 0:01:26 | 0:01:28 | |
operating telescopes in Italy and the United States. | 0:01:28 | 0:01:31 | |
The Vatican is truly a serious player in the field of astronomy. | 0:01:31 | 0:01:35 | |
Tonight, we are in Italy to explore | 0:01:37 | 0:01:40 | |
the rich and varied world of Vatican astronomy. | 0:01:40 | 0:01:43 | |
It's a shame if you're a religious person | 0:01:46 | 0:01:49 | |
but you've closed your eyes to science. | 0:01:49 | 0:01:51 | |
From Galileo to modern, cutting-edge science... | 0:01:51 | 0:01:54 | |
..we'll investigate the priest who revolutionised stellar astronomy. | 0:01:56 | 0:02:00 | |
And unearth new scientific revelations | 0:02:02 | 0:02:04 | |
from an old photographic star map. | 0:02:04 | 0:02:07 | |
And we'll discover how the Vatican | 0:02:09 | 0:02:11 | |
is trying to explain creation itself. | 0:02:11 | 0:02:13 | |
But first, Maggie finds out how one of the world's largest religious | 0:02:14 | 0:02:18 | |
organisations got mixed up in astronomy in the first place. | 0:02:18 | 0:02:21 | |
This is the Meridian Hall in the Tower of the Winds. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:29 | |
It's perched above one of the great rooms of the Vatican. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:35 | |
With its murals of ancient Romans, | 0:02:38 | 0:02:40 | |
the Hall looks a bit like a stately home. | 0:02:40 | 0:02:43 | |
But unknown to most, back in the 16th century, | 0:02:43 | 0:02:46 | |
this room had a very different function... | 0:02:46 | 0:02:48 | |
..which you can only get an inkling of in the dark. | 0:02:50 | 0:02:54 | |
It's all a bit Dan Brown or Raiders Of The Lost Ark. | 0:02:54 | 0:03:00 | |
This is what it's all about. | 0:03:03 | 0:03:05 | |
At noon, a beam of sunlight bursts through that hole at the top of the | 0:03:06 | 0:03:09 | |
wall and projects onto the floor. | 0:03:09 | 0:03:11 | |
It was cloudy while we were here, | 0:03:13 | 0:03:15 | |
but this amateur footage shows the spot on the floor. | 0:03:15 | 0:03:18 | |
It tells us something fascinating. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:22 | |
This whole room is actually a very accurate sundial. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:25 | |
And it was built in 1580 | 0:03:27 | 0:03:29 | |
to help resolve something they didn't understand. | 0:03:29 | 0:03:32 | |
Significant astronomical events, like the solstice and the equinoxes, | 0:03:33 | 0:03:37 | |
were occurring earlier and earlier in the year. | 0:03:37 | 0:03:41 | |
The calendar they'd used for millennia wasn't working. | 0:03:41 | 0:03:44 | |
By the 16th century, the calendar was nearly two weeks out. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:50 | |
The spring equinox was occurring on the 10th of March rather than around | 0:03:50 | 0:03:54 | |
the 21st of March, where it had started. | 0:03:54 | 0:03:56 | |
And every year, it was getting more and more out of kilter. | 0:03:56 | 0:04:00 | |
It was obvious that the number of days in the calendar year | 0:04:03 | 0:04:07 | |
didn't match the passage of the seasons - | 0:04:07 | 0:04:09 | |
the true astronomical year. | 0:04:09 | 0:04:11 | |
The calendar was out. | 0:04:12 | 0:04:14 | |
The question was, how much? | 0:04:14 | 0:04:16 | |
So, to illustrate the drift, the Pope built this sundial. | 0:04:18 | 0:04:23 | |
Every day at noon, when the sun was at its highest, | 0:04:23 | 0:04:26 | |
a spot of light was projected on the floor. | 0:04:26 | 0:04:28 | |
As the year progressed, the height of the Sun changed, | 0:04:29 | 0:04:33 | |
so the position of the spot moved, too. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:35 | |
Recording this change meant priests could work out exactly | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
where the spot would land at noon on the astronomical equinox. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:44 | |
Here. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:46 | |
Now they could compare the astronomical date of the equinox | 0:04:48 | 0:04:52 | |
with the calendar date. | 0:04:52 | 0:04:53 | |
This enabled them to work out exactly how far the calendar | 0:04:53 | 0:04:57 | |
had slipped and exactly how long a year actually was | 0:04:57 | 0:05:01 | |
and finally get the calendar back on track. | 0:05:01 | 0:05:04 | |
After seven years of diligent study, | 0:05:05 | 0:05:08 | |
Pope Gregory XIII concluded that the real length of a year was | 0:05:08 | 0:05:12 | |
365.2425 days. | 0:05:12 | 0:05:17 | |
And to get the calendar back on track, he took drastic action. | 0:05:18 | 0:05:22 | |
He removed ten days from the calendar. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:27 | |
Suddenly, the day after the 4th of October was the 15th of October! | 0:05:27 | 0:05:32 | |
He had created the Gregorian calendar that we use today, | 0:05:32 | 0:05:35 | |
and something else, too. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:37 | |
It signalled a new papal interest in the scientific workings | 0:05:39 | 0:05:43 | |
of the stars and the planets, in astronomy. | 0:05:43 | 0:05:46 | |
But the Vatican's hope for a fruitful relationship with science | 0:05:49 | 0:05:52 | |
was soon to flounder. | 0:05:52 | 0:05:54 | |
After the success of Pope Gregory's calendar in 1582, | 0:05:56 | 0:06:00 | |
things went horribly wrong. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:03 | |
A certain scientist came up with an idea that was so controversial | 0:06:03 | 0:06:06 | |
that it shook the Catholic Church for centuries to come. | 0:06:06 | 0:06:10 | |
I'm talking, of course, of Galileo Galilei. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
Galileo got into trouble by promoting an idea | 0:06:22 | 0:06:24 | |
that's utterly commonplace today - | 0:06:24 | 0:06:27 | |
that the sun is the centre of the solar system. | 0:06:27 | 0:06:29 | |
He did that in books like this one. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:31 | |
This is his Dialogue On The Two Chief World Systems, | 0:06:31 | 0:06:34 | |
not an original copy, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:35 | |
but what the Vatican told us was a modern Latin translation from 1699. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:40 | |
Having the sun at the centre of the universe, heliocentricism, | 0:06:44 | 0:06:49 | |
actually appeared in the works of Copernicus | 0:06:49 | 0:06:52 | |
a generation before Galileo. | 0:06:52 | 0:06:54 | |
And for many years, it was uncontroversial, | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
taught even here at the Vatican as a useful mathematical device. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:03 | |
But nearly a century later, Galileo found himself in a Vatican court, | 0:07:04 | 0:07:09 | |
just for defending his beliefs. | 0:07:09 | 0:07:11 | |
To discover why, Maggie talked to the director of the Vatican Observatory, | 0:07:16 | 0:07:20 | |
Brother Guy Consolmagno, in one of the Vatican's many libraries. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:25 | |
So, what was Galileo actually tried for? | 0:07:25 | 0:07:27 | |
Good question. You read the trial and the only thing they discuss is | 0:07:27 | 0:07:32 | |
whether or not he obeyed the adjunction | 0:07:32 | 0:07:34 | |
he had gotten 20 years earlier to | 0:07:34 | 0:07:36 | |
not push the Copernican system, which he obviously was pushing. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:39 | |
But he said, | 0:07:39 | 0:07:41 | |
"If there's any place you want me to change | 0:07:41 | 0:07:43 | |
"so I don't do that in my book, I'll be free to change it." | 0:07:43 | 0:07:45 | |
And they kept saying, "No, no, we have to find you guilty of something." | 0:07:45 | 0:07:48 | |
Then they tried out a verdict that has nothing to do | 0:07:48 | 0:07:51 | |
with what they talked about, saying, "We found you guilty of heresy." | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
And he said, "No, you didn't, you haven't found any of..." | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
So they change it to, "We found you guilty of vehement suspicion of heresy," | 0:07:57 | 0:08:01 | |
which is kind of an odd thing to be guilty of. | 0:08:01 | 0:08:04 | |
So we've got this old system but, after a while, with Newton's work, | 0:08:04 | 0:08:08 | |
we embrace the new system, we've got evidence now. | 0:08:08 | 0:08:11 | |
And so the Church embraced the idea? | 0:08:11 | 0:08:13 | |
It did, actually. By the 1750s, | 0:08:13 | 0:08:16 | |
only 20 years after Newton's final edition, they said | 0:08:16 | 0:08:19 | |
it's OK to teach the Copernican system, not just as mathematics, | 0:08:19 | 0:08:23 | |
but as a way of explaining the universe, | 0:08:23 | 0:08:26 | |
with the one exception that Galileo's book | 0:08:26 | 0:08:29 | |
was still on the index where you needed permission to read it. | 0:08:29 | 0:08:32 | |
-It's just human nature, they didn't want to admit they were wrong. -Yes. | 0:08:32 | 0:08:35 | |
But they didn't admit they were wrong for a long time. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:38 | |
Well, about Galileo, they took it off the index in about 1820, | 0:08:38 | 0:08:40 | |
and they are kind of embarrassed it was still on by then, | 0:08:40 | 0:08:43 | |
nobody had noticed. | 0:08:43 | 0:08:45 | |
The interesting thing that happened in 1992, | 0:08:45 | 0:08:48 | |
Pope John Paul II said | 0:08:48 | 0:08:50 | |
let's go back and have the Church admit it was wrong, | 0:08:50 | 0:08:54 | |
not just in what it said about Galileo, | 0:08:54 | 0:08:57 | |
but the very fact that Galileo went on trial. | 0:08:57 | 0:09:00 | |
I mean, they got Galileo on a technicality. | 0:09:00 | 0:09:02 | |
He really did push the Copernican system | 0:09:02 | 0:09:04 | |
-the way he'd promised he wasn't going to. -Yes. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:07 | |
And he was guilty of that, but that's not the point. | 0:09:07 | 0:09:10 | |
The point is they shouldn't have tried him for it. | 0:09:10 | 0:09:13 | |
And so Pope John Paul II apologised publicly to Galileo | 0:09:13 | 0:09:17 | |
for having put him on trial. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:20 | |
Naturally, people are going to read that, | 0:09:20 | 0:09:21 | |
"Oh, finally the Church accepts the Copernican..." | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
No, no. We'd been teaching that for a few hundred years. | 0:09:24 | 0:09:28 | |
Despite the Galileo incident, | 0:09:31 | 0:09:33 | |
the Vatican continued its interest in astronomy. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:36 | |
And within a hundred years, | 0:09:38 | 0:09:39 | |
they'd built a new observatory within the Vatican walls | 0:09:39 | 0:09:43 | |
and its reputation soon began to grow. | 0:09:43 | 0:09:46 | |
The next crucial part of the story of Vatican astronomy | 0:09:46 | 0:09:49 | |
takes place in the 19th century here at the Church of Sant'Ignazio | 0:09:49 | 0:09:54 | |
in the centre of Rome. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:56 | |
It was here that a new way of looking at the universe | 0:09:56 | 0:09:59 | |
was developed, and it's one that's still important to astronomy today. | 0:09:59 | 0:10:02 | |
This is Father Angelo Secchi, | 0:10:04 | 0:10:06 | |
a Jesuit priest and a passionate astronomer. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:10 | |
He ran the Vatican Observatory for 30 years, | 0:10:12 | 0:10:15 | |
helping turn it into a world-class | 0:10:15 | 0:10:17 | |
scientific and astronomical institution. | 0:10:17 | 0:10:19 | |
He oversaw its move in 1853 from inside the Vatican walls to a larger | 0:10:23 | 0:10:27 | |
facility on the roof of this church... | 0:10:27 | 0:10:30 | |
..one large enough to house the most modern of telescopes. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:35 | |
With his state-of-the-art observatory, | 0:10:37 | 0:10:38 | |
he started a new and unique project, | 0:10:38 | 0:10:41 | |
and he began to see the stars in a way | 0:10:41 | 0:10:43 | |
that no-one had ever done before. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:45 | |
Secchi's innovation was to organise the stars into groups, | 0:10:50 | 0:10:55 | |
and he used their light to classify them. | 0:10:55 | 0:10:57 | |
And the secret to Secchi's classification was the development of something | 0:11:00 | 0:11:04 | |
called spectroscopy. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:06 | |
Spectroscopy was first discovered by Isaac Newton when he observed that a | 0:11:07 | 0:11:12 | |
beam of light can be split into a spectrum. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:16 | |
But later, scientists noticed that those spectra | 0:11:16 | 0:11:19 | |
often contained dark lines. | 0:11:19 | 0:11:21 | |
And those lines hold unique information about what the source of | 0:11:21 | 0:11:26 | |
the light was made of. | 0:11:26 | 0:11:27 | |
Secchi's genius, though, was to use this new tool on the stars. | 0:11:29 | 0:11:33 | |
His results showed that each star has a distinctive pattern of lines. | 0:11:36 | 0:11:41 | |
And Secchi used these patterns to sort the stars | 0:11:44 | 0:11:47 | |
into four separate groups. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
His system inspired the way that we classify the stars today... | 0:11:50 | 0:11:54 | |
..and we now know that the lines in the spectra that he was seeing | 0:11:55 | 0:11:59 | |
identify elements in the stars. | 0:11:59 | 0:12:01 | |
That's why this is still such a useful tool. | 0:12:03 | 0:12:05 | |
On the roof of Secchi's old observatory, | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
'I met Father David Brown, | 0:12:11 | 0:12:12 | |
'who works with the Vatican's current spectroscopy group | 0:12:12 | 0:12:15 | |
'at their telescope in Arizona.' | 0:12:15 | 0:12:18 | |
Oh, wow! | 0:12:18 | 0:12:19 | |
This is where Secchi did his spectroscopy. | 0:12:20 | 0:12:23 | |
What does modern spectroscopy tell us? | 0:12:23 | 0:12:25 | |
Essentially the idea's still the same. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:27 | |
What has changed would be the technology. | 0:12:27 | 0:12:30 | |
So what does a modern spectrum look like? | 0:12:30 | 0:12:32 | |
This would be an example right over here of a modern spectrum. | 0:12:32 | 0:12:36 | |
This right over here would indicate the wavelength. | 0:12:36 | 0:12:38 | |
This would be the amount of light at each different wavelength. | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
If you can see right over here these small dips in the curve, | 0:12:41 | 0:12:44 | |
this would indicate the presence of certain elements that are absorbing | 0:12:44 | 0:12:49 | |
certain types of wavelength right there. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:51 | |
So that's what we sometimes see as these black lines | 0:12:51 | 0:12:53 | |
-in the rainbow spectrum? -Exactly, exactly. | 0:12:53 | 0:12:55 | |
Yeah, I guess this is labelled as magnesium here and iron | 0:12:55 | 0:12:58 | |
-and some other things. -Iron right there, yes. | 0:12:58 | 0:13:00 | |
Father Brown and his team use modern spectroscopy to research | 0:13:00 | 0:13:04 | |
a strange type of star which has defied classification. | 0:13:04 | 0:13:07 | |
The middle one right over here is part of what we're doing | 0:13:07 | 0:13:11 | |
actually at the observatory, what is known as a Lambda Boo star. | 0:13:11 | 0:13:15 | |
These are stars that have a certain dearth of what are known | 0:13:15 | 0:13:19 | |
as iron peak elements, so that would be elements | 0:13:19 | 0:13:21 | |
right around the mass of an iron atom, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:23 | |
so cobalt, nickel, magnesium. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:26 | |
Yeah, and you can see there's the magnesium line | 0:13:26 | 0:13:28 | |
that's disappeared here almost entirely. | 0:13:28 | 0:13:30 | |
Exactly, and so the work centres on observing these types of stars | 0:13:30 | 0:13:34 | |
and of course asking the question, well, why? | 0:13:34 | 0:13:37 | |
These are generally stars of the same spectral type. | 0:13:37 | 0:13:41 | |
Why do their spectra differ? | 0:13:41 | 0:13:43 | |
One particular hypothesis is that | 0:13:43 | 0:13:45 | |
such Lambda Boo stars are able to create matter, | 0:13:45 | 0:13:49 | |
-circumstellar matter... -Just leftover material? | 0:13:49 | 0:13:52 | |
Exactly, exactly. | 0:13:52 | 0:13:53 | |
..onto themselves and this particular type of matter would be... | 0:13:53 | 0:13:57 | |
type of gas would be metal-poor. | 0:13:57 | 0:13:59 | |
And so that type of gas falling onto the star would serve to dilute the | 0:13:59 | 0:14:05 | |
-concentration... -Oh, so you sort of temporarily hide | 0:14:05 | 0:14:08 | |
-the underlying atmosphere. -Exactly, exactly. | 0:14:08 | 0:14:10 | |
-Because of that. -Fascinating. | 0:14:10 | 0:14:11 | |
The fact that you can see that in the spectrum, | 0:14:11 | 0:14:13 | |
I think Secchi would have been proud of that. | 0:14:13 | 0:14:15 | |
Very much. He would have been fascinated by something like this, | 0:14:15 | 0:14:18 | |
and certainly very happy that his work, in many ways, | 0:14:18 | 0:14:21 | |
has continued at the successor to his observatory. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:24 | |
Secchi's work launched a golden age of Vatican astronomical research. | 0:14:28 | 0:14:32 | |
And we're travelling 30 kilometres south of the Vatican | 0:14:34 | 0:14:37 | |
to the home of that research. | 0:14:37 | 0:14:39 | |
Castel Gandolfo - the Pope's summer palace. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
Here, Pope Pius XI built a new observatory | 0:14:46 | 0:14:49 | |
free from the glare of Rome. | 0:14:49 | 0:14:51 | |
Today, it's where half a dozen priest scientists live and work, | 0:14:53 | 0:14:57 | |
and it's home to four telescopes. | 0:14:57 | 0:14:59 | |
One of these telescopes was at the heart of what was in its day | 0:15:01 | 0:15:04 | |
one of the biggest science projects in the world, | 0:15:04 | 0:15:08 | |
a project that would dominate astronomy for over 50 years... | 0:15:08 | 0:15:12 | |
..the Carte du Ciel, the first photographic map of the whole sky. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:18 | |
By the end of the 19th century, | 0:15:21 | 0:15:22 | |
astronomers had realised that photographic plates | 0:15:22 | 0:15:25 | |
could register thousands of new stars invisible to the human eye. | 0:15:25 | 0:15:29 | |
And they could use them to create a new kind of map of the stars. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:36 | |
The Vatican contributed 2,000 plates to the project. | 0:15:40 | 0:15:44 | |
'They're curated by Father Alessandro Omizzolo.' | 0:15:44 | 0:15:47 | |
Can you tell me, what was the goal of the project Carte du Ciel? | 0:15:47 | 0:15:51 | |
The goal was double. | 0:15:51 | 0:15:52 | |
The first one was to have a photographic map of the whole sky. | 0:15:53 | 0:15:59 | |
-The entire sky? -Yes. | 0:15:59 | 0:16:01 | |
This project... | 0:16:01 | 0:16:03 | |
..was proposed to the observatories of the Lord | 0:16:04 | 0:16:08 | |
and so the Pope decided that the Vatican astronomers | 0:16:08 | 0:16:11 | |
should be involved in this scientific enterprise | 0:16:11 | 0:16:15 | |
because the aim of the Vatican Observatory | 0:16:15 | 0:16:19 | |
was to do astronomy as the professional astronomers do. | 0:16:19 | 0:16:23 | |
These are some of the plates. Now, what's special about this plate? | 0:16:23 | 0:16:26 | |
This is the first plate. | 0:16:26 | 0:16:29 | |
The first plate taken here? | 0:16:29 | 0:16:31 | |
Not only here. All over the world. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:33 | |
Wow! The first plate for the whole project? | 0:16:33 | 0:16:36 | |
The first plate of the Carte du Ciel project. | 0:16:36 | 0:16:38 | |
It is... | 0:16:40 | 0:16:41 | |
It was taken... | 0:16:42 | 0:16:43 | |
..August 8, 1891. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:47 | |
The plates revealed a wealth of new stars previously too faint to see | 0:16:50 | 0:16:55 | |
and incredible details of other objects, too, like Halley's Comet. | 0:16:55 | 0:16:59 | |
Father Alessandro, how many stars appeared on each plate? | 0:17:01 | 0:17:04 | |
With the Carte du Ciel plates, | 0:17:06 | 0:17:09 | |
we have magnitudes up to 14, so perhaps... | 0:17:09 | 0:17:13 | |
-..1,000. -OK. | 0:17:14 | 0:17:16 | |
-But no more. -How many plates were generated across the project? | 0:17:16 | 0:17:19 | |
Every telescope generated 2,000 plates. | 0:17:21 | 0:17:25 | |
That's a lot of data. | 0:17:25 | 0:17:26 | |
Yes, a lot of data. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:28 | |
So, how was the data processed? | 0:17:28 | 0:17:30 | |
The data... | 0:17:31 | 0:17:33 | |
processed by three nuns. | 0:17:33 | 0:17:35 | |
-Three nuns? -Yes. | 0:17:35 | 0:17:36 | |
-Just three? -Three. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:38 | |
So these three nuns worked a lot, | 0:17:38 | 0:17:41 | |
many years to get the position of the stars | 0:17:41 | 0:17:43 | |
and also the magnitude of the stars. | 0:17:43 | 0:17:46 | |
In the last few years, | 0:17:46 | 0:17:48 | |
scientists have renewed their interest in this data. | 0:17:48 | 0:17:50 | |
The European Space Agency launched the telescopes Hipparcos and Gaia | 0:17:56 | 0:18:00 | |
to map the galaxy. | 0:18:00 | 0:18:01 | |
Comparing those results to the Carte du Ciel images | 0:18:04 | 0:18:07 | |
might reveal how the sky has changed over a hundred years. | 0:18:07 | 0:18:11 | |
The Vatican Observatory decide about 20 years ago | 0:18:13 | 0:18:17 | |
to digitise every plate, so to preserve the information | 0:18:17 | 0:18:22 | |
but also to offer the possibility to international community | 0:18:22 | 0:18:27 | |
of the astronomers to access this data, | 0:18:27 | 0:18:31 | |
to compare the position of the stars from the Carte du Ciel project | 0:18:31 | 0:18:37 | |
with the position of the same star from Hipparcos or Gaia. | 0:18:37 | 0:18:42 | |
I think it's a fantastic project but really exciting that data gathered | 0:18:42 | 0:18:46 | |
100 years ago is still relevant today and can be compared with data | 0:18:46 | 0:18:50 | |
we're getting today and tell us things. | 0:18:50 | 0:18:52 | |
-Yes. -Tell us new things. | 0:18:52 | 0:18:53 | |
-Yes. -So thank you very much, it's a brilliant project. | 0:18:53 | 0:18:55 | |
Thanks to you. | 0:18:55 | 0:18:56 | |
Castel Gandolfo is the largest Vatican territory, | 0:18:58 | 0:19:02 | |
larger than its base in Rome and all of its embassies. | 0:19:02 | 0:19:05 | |
And it's stunning. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:06 | |
Because of its beauty, | 0:19:08 | 0:19:09 | |
it's hard for me to imagine that within these walls, | 0:19:09 | 0:19:12 | |
cutting-edge physics is actually happening. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:14 | |
If there's one scientific problem that you would expect | 0:19:16 | 0:19:19 | |
the Catholic Church to be working on, it's the problem of creation, | 0:19:19 | 0:19:23 | |
how the universe got started in the first place. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:26 | |
And in fact, the details of what we'd call the Big Bang theory | 0:19:26 | 0:19:29 | |
were first worked out by a Belgian Catholic priest | 0:19:29 | 0:19:32 | |
called George Lemaitre. | 0:19:32 | 0:19:33 | |
Father George Lemaitre was a contemporary of Einstein's | 0:19:35 | 0:19:38 | |
and was one of the first to come up with the vision | 0:19:38 | 0:19:41 | |
of the universe that we understand today. | 0:19:41 | 0:19:43 | |
He realised that Einstein's theories suggested that the universe could be | 0:19:44 | 0:19:49 | |
expanding, an idea spectacularly confirmed in the 1920s through | 0:19:49 | 0:19:54 | |
measurements of distant galaxies. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:56 | |
But this idea also suggests that if you wind back time, | 0:19:57 | 0:20:02 | |
you arrive at a moment when the universe | 0:20:02 | 0:20:04 | |
must have been a single point. | 0:20:04 | 0:20:05 | |
And that point is what we now call the Big Bang. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:09 | |
Today, over 100 years after Lemaitre's work, | 0:20:10 | 0:20:14 | |
physicists are trying to understand the very first moment of the | 0:20:14 | 0:20:17 | |
universe's life. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:18 | |
That moment is known as the Planck era. | 0:20:20 | 0:20:23 | |
And it's so strange that during it the two great theories of physics, | 0:20:23 | 0:20:27 | |
quantum mechanics and general relativity, break down. | 0:20:27 | 0:20:30 | |
Many scientists, including some here at the Vatican Observatory, | 0:20:34 | 0:20:38 | |
are now trying to come up with a new theory that combines the two - | 0:20:38 | 0:20:42 | |
quantum gravity. | 0:20:42 | 0:20:44 | |
Their approach is controversial | 0:20:45 | 0:20:47 | |
because it tweaks the fundamentals of gravity itself. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:51 | |
When we say Big Bang, we mean that hot, dense state | 0:20:53 | 0:20:56 | |
-and also the moment at the beginning. -Beginning, yes. | 0:20:56 | 0:21:00 | |
-Yeah. -Let's talk about the dense state first. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:02 | |
So what physics is happening? | 0:21:03 | 0:21:05 | |
What can we say about the laws that govern the universe | 0:21:05 | 0:21:08 | |
right back at the beginning? | 0:21:08 | 0:21:09 | |
So that's a billionth, billionth, billionth, billionth, | 0:21:29 | 0:21:33 | |
and then a few bits more. | 0:21:33 | 0:21:35 | |
So tell me about your work. | 0:21:45 | 0:21:47 | |
What's your approach to try and solve these problems? | 0:21:47 | 0:21:49 | |
That's the strength of gravity. | 0:22:23 | 0:22:25 | |
Which we assume is the same everywhere in the universe. | 0:22:25 | 0:22:28 | |
At that early time. | 0:22:36 | 0:22:37 | |
So the idea is you play with things | 0:22:55 | 0:22:57 | |
you would normally leave alone to try and get | 0:22:57 | 0:22:59 | |
a theory that works at this early time. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:02 | |
Early time, exactly. | 0:23:02 | 0:23:03 | |
And then I guess you've got to do something to make | 0:23:03 | 0:23:05 | |
it work later in the universe so it becomes the gravity we see. | 0:23:05 | 0:23:09 | |
Thank you very much. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:27 | |
It's thrilling stuff. | 0:23:29 | 0:23:30 | |
But, like all the work we've seen being done here | 0:23:32 | 0:23:34 | |
at the Vatican Observatory, it does beg a question. | 0:23:34 | 0:23:37 | |
Why are they doing it at all? | 0:23:39 | 0:23:40 | |
Chris met with the Observatory's director, Brother Guy Consolmagno, | 0:23:42 | 0:23:46 | |
to talk about the relationship between astronomy and religion. | 0:23:46 | 0:23:50 | |
So, Brother Guy, thank you for having us | 0:23:50 | 0:23:52 | |
in this rather wonderful place. | 0:23:52 | 0:23:55 | |
It's great to show it off. | 0:23:55 | 0:23:56 | |
-I just love it. -Yeah. I guess my question is why are you here? | 0:23:56 | 0:23:59 | |
Why does the Vatican have astronomers? | 0:23:59 | 0:24:02 | |
Why does anybody have astronomers? | 0:24:02 | 0:24:03 | |
You know, a friend of mine says | 0:24:03 | 0:24:05 | |
it's because we couldn't afford a particle accelerator. | 0:24:05 | 0:24:07 | |
Why does anybody do astronomy? | 0:24:09 | 0:24:10 | |
It's not going to make you rich, it's not going to make you famous, | 0:24:10 | 0:24:13 | |
it's not going to get you girls, didn't work for me. | 0:24:13 | 0:24:15 | |
So why do we do astronomy? | 0:24:15 | 0:24:18 | |
I had no answer for that when I was a postdoc at MIT, | 0:24:18 | 0:24:22 | |
and I quit and I joined the Peace Corps and went off to Africa. | 0:24:22 | 0:24:25 | |
And the Africans were fascinated with astronomy. | 0:24:25 | 0:24:27 | |
The Africans wanted to know why did we go to the moon, | 0:24:27 | 0:24:30 | |
what was it like when we got there? | 0:24:30 | 0:24:32 | |
They wanted to look through my telescope | 0:24:32 | 0:24:34 | |
and when they saw the rings of Saturn they went, "Wow!" | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
And that's when I realised that we don't live by bread alone. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:41 | |
Astronomy is one of those places where we can ask | 0:24:41 | 0:24:44 | |
the bigger questions than just "What's for lunch?" | 0:24:44 | 0:24:47 | |
I guess people... | 0:24:47 | 0:24:48 | |
..are surprised that somebody of deep religious faith | 0:24:50 | 0:24:53 | |
can be a scientist and I'm trying to think why that is | 0:24:53 | 0:24:56 | |
and here's what I've come up with. | 0:24:56 | 0:24:58 | |
-OK. -I think what it is is that... | 0:24:58 | 0:25:00 | |
..in science, it's all about creating simple answers, right? | 0:25:01 | 0:25:05 | |
So as a physicist, I'm not allowed to invent 600 reasons why a star is | 0:25:05 | 0:25:11 | |
misbehaving or why a planet behaves in a particular way, | 0:25:11 | 0:25:13 | |
-I have to find the simple answer. -Right. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:15 | |
And you seem to do that and then invent or add God to that. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:21 | |
-Yeah. -God is not necessary, I think. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:23 | |
Oh, and that's of course a complete misunderstanding, | 0:25:23 | 0:25:26 | |
really of what science is, that a lot of people have. | 0:25:26 | 0:25:28 | |
I put it a different way. | 0:25:28 | 0:25:30 | |
People think there's the big book of science with all the science answers | 0:25:30 | 0:25:33 | |
and the big book of religion with all the religion answers and, | 0:25:33 | 0:25:35 | |
"Oh, my gosh, what happens if they don't agree?" | 0:25:35 | 0:25:37 | |
But science is not the book of answers, | 0:25:37 | 0:25:40 | |
it's the conversation that you and I have about the answers. | 0:25:40 | 0:25:44 | |
And the conversation can go on forever | 0:25:44 | 0:25:46 | |
because we'll never get to the bottom | 0:25:46 | 0:25:48 | |
of understanding how those bits fit together. | 0:25:48 | 0:25:51 | |
The religion side is not, "These are the answers," | 0:25:51 | 0:25:55 | |
but rather, "This is how we've experienced God. | 0:25:55 | 0:25:58 | |
"See if you can find that experience, that same God, | 0:25:58 | 0:26:02 | |
"when you experience the data." | 0:26:02 | 0:26:05 | |
I want to come back to this idea of sort of questions | 0:26:05 | 0:26:07 | |
which are approached philosophically, where the questions | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
don't go away and you sort of gain | 0:26:10 | 0:26:12 | |
new insight by thinking about them again and again, | 0:26:12 | 0:26:14 | |
versus sort of scientific questions, | 0:26:14 | 0:26:17 | |
where the idea is to solve that and get a new question | 0:26:17 | 0:26:19 | |
and sort of take the next ticket and keep grinding out. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:22 | |
How do you decide which question falls in which category? | 0:26:22 | 0:26:26 | |
Some are obvious. You know, I want to know what spectrum Sirius has, | 0:26:26 | 0:26:29 | |
-that's scientific. -Yes, exactly. -But if I want to know why death exists... | 0:26:29 | 0:26:33 | |
Isn't there a grey area in the middle? | 0:26:33 | 0:26:35 | |
Absolutely, and that's why it's not a solved problem. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:39 | |
That's why it's not something that you can have a computer do for you. | 0:26:39 | 0:26:42 | |
You can't work out a calculus of ethics. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:46 | |
People tried. It's always a disaster. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:48 | |
And you have to remember that religion is not | 0:26:48 | 0:26:50 | |
in the business of answering questions, | 0:26:50 | 0:26:52 | |
religion is in the business of suggesting questions. | 0:26:52 | 0:26:56 | |
So religion and science are both on this road between truth and | 0:26:56 | 0:26:58 | |
understanding but, you know, it's a two-way road. | 0:26:58 | 0:27:01 | |
And it's a shame if you only have the one and not the other. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:05 | |
It's a shame if you're a religious person but you've closed your eyes | 0:27:05 | 0:27:08 | |
to science, because you've closed your eyes to this incredibly rich | 0:27:08 | 0:27:12 | |
way of experiencing the Creator. | 0:27:12 | 0:27:16 | |
Well, I'm glad that we are and I'm glad we sorted some of this out. | 0:27:16 | 0:27:19 | |
-Thank you very much. -I don't think we'll ever sort it out | 0:27:19 | 0:27:21 | |
-but we'll have a lot of fun talking about it. -Thank you very much. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:24 | |
However you might feel about the overlap between science and religion, | 0:27:29 | 0:27:33 | |
the Vatican Observatory has been a fascinating place to visit. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:37 | |
It's always wonderful getting access to a new observatory | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
but I found this trip quite surprising. | 0:27:40 | 0:27:42 | |
I was surprised at the rich history that the Vatican Observatory has. | 0:27:42 | 0:27:46 | |
But you'd think there'd be some conflict | 0:27:46 | 0:27:48 | |
between a religious organisation working in science, | 0:27:48 | 0:27:51 | |
but I've seen no evidence of that at all. | 0:27:51 | 0:27:53 | |
Just people really enjoying their work. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:55 | |
And for me, it's been a nice reminder that the quest | 0:27:55 | 0:27:57 | |
to understand the universe is something truly international, | 0:27:57 | 0:28:00 | |
something everyone can take part in, no matter where they're from. | 0:28:00 | 0:28:04 | |
That's it for tonight, but do join us next month, | 0:28:04 | 0:28:06 | |
where we'll be looking to the very edges of the solar system | 0:28:06 | 0:28:09 | |
to find out what lurks out there. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:11 | |
And remember to check out the star guide on our website | 0:28:11 | 0:28:13 | |
to find out what's happening in the night sky during June. | 0:28:13 | 0:28:17 | |
And don't forget, in the meantime, get outside and get looking up. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:21 | |
Goodnight. | 0:28:21 | 0:28:22 |