81st Annual Meeting of The Meteoritical Society 2018 (LPI Contrib. No. 2067) sess271.pdf

Monday, July 23, 2018 BARRINGER LECTURE 7:00 p.m. Concert Hall of the Academy of Building

7:00 p.m. Barringer Lecture Guest Speaker: Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ

The Philosophy of Meteoritics: Awe, Faith, and Data “Doing science” can mean efforts ranging from the billion-dollar efforts of “big science” such as spacecraft missions, to much smaller scale science like the measurements of meteorite physical properties that we do in our small lab at the . People often question the monetary cost of these efforts: why does the government spend billions doing something as esoteric as visiting an ? Why does the Vatican support an astronomical observatory?

But these questions mask a deeper question: why do we individuals choose to spend our lives in pursuit of pure knowledge? How are these choices made? What are the motivations, both spoken and unspoken, that go into the way we do our science? What assumptions do we start with? How do we decide what science we do? And how does our community arrive at consensus on what is “commonly accepted?”

The motivation behind our choices, both as individuals and as a society, affects the sorts of science that gets done; the kinds of answers that are found to be satisfying; and ultimately, the way in which we think of ourselves.

Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ is the Director of the Vatican Observatory and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation.

Brother Guy became intimately aware of rocks while growing up in on the shore of Lake Huron; he first encountered meteoritics in a series of memorable classes with John Lewis at MIT. At the he was Mike Drake’s first graduate student, modeling the evolution of trace elements in basaltic systems. This work culminated in their 1977 paper on the basaltic meteorites and Vesta, work he has most recently revisited in light of the Dawn mission results. He then switched fields to write his dissertation on solar system magnetic fields with J. R. Jokipii. His postdocs at Harvard with Al Cameron and MIT with Sean Solomon continued this combination of planetary chemistry and physics, modeling icy moons and dusty rings.

But the “bigger questions” in life led him to leave science and teach with the U.S. Peace Corps in Africa. It was there, sharing the dark skies with his Kenyan students, that his original passion for was reignited. Returning to the U.S., he taught astronomy at Lafayette College and then entered the Jesuits in 1989, thinking to continue his teaching career at one of the Jesuit colleges in the U.S. Instead, 1993 he was assigned to the Vatican Observatory where he found himself reunited with meteorites, as the curator of the Vatican’s sizable collection. Thus began his research program (with Dan Britt, and later Br. Bob Macke) on meteorite physical properties…which led to travels to other collections around the world, including a season collecting meteorites with ANSMET on the blue ice regions of East Antarctica.

The same interests that led him to Africa, and eventually to the Jesuits, are now seen in his extensive writing and speaking schedule. Over the past few years he has given upwards of 100 public talks per year while writing numerous popular articles and books, including Turn Left at Orion (with Dan Davis) and Would You Baptize an Extraterrestial? (with Paul Mueller). The theme in common to all these presentations is an exploration of why we do science; where we find wonder and joy in our work; and how we can share this wonder and joy with the rest of the world.