You’ve come, have you? – You’ve come, you source of tears to many mothers. It is long since I saw you; but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country.

The comet was indeed bright, reputedly about four times the brightness of Venus. Everyone who looked up must have seen it.

But did he see it as a child? He says, “It is long since I saw you…”

Perhaps. But the periodic return of comets was not understood in those days, so possibly he saw another one. If he actually saw the 990 visit of Halley’s, which returns every 76 years, he must have been born in the 980’s. Long life, but those medievals who survived infancy and were not in the saddle (were not soldiers) generally lived as long as we do.

However that may be, even more than for his record of seeing the comet, Eilmer is known for his effort to fly. Somehow, after reading the story of Daedalus, he thought he would give it a try. He fastened wings to his hands, feet, and took a great jump off the top of one of the towers of Malmesbury Abbey. He says he glided 200 km, but the wind was unsteady and he had “forgotten” to provide himself with a tail to stabilize his flight. The crash landing broke both legs, and he was somewhat lame the rest of his life, though not bedridden. That distance of gliding means he was probably airborne for as much as 15 seconds, probably the most intense 15 seconds of his life.

He did not try again. He studied astrology, which in those days would have been a mix of astronomy and astrology. In other words, he knew the stars. The Church permitted astrology so long as it was not practiced in a manner that would deny free will or our first obligation to take our future from the hands of Jesus.

Brother Eilmer’s efforts at flight are interesting from the perspective that they show his curiosity and they also mean that the possibility of flight was actively on men’s minds, not as magic, but as something to be understood. They studied the wing shapes of birds – we know this from their drawings of angel wings – and they believed that air could provide a lift if properly understood.

The Mayans lived in a karst landscape on the Yucatan peninsula. A karst landscape is one whose bedrock is limestone rather than sandstone, shale, or some kind of igneous or metamorphic rock. The characteristic of limestone is that, while it may hold water in streams and pools, it is always eroded by the presence or passage of water. Shale repels water; we may find oil in shale, but not water. Igneous rocks – rocks from volcanoes – are too solidly constructed to allow the entrance of water into their structure. Metamorphic rocks – rocks that result from powerful compression – are also too dense to hold water.

Sandstone, however, holds water like a sponge, and the common wells, all over the world, reach into sandstone so that the water seeps from the sandstone into our pumping apparatus. No such well can be arranged in limestone. If there were to be a sandstone composed of shelly crumbs, and if water were introduced into such an environment, it would either erode the sand and carry it away in a white stream, or it would clog the crumbs with lime, and quickly close up their pores.

In that respect, limestone is like shale and the other unsandy rocks: water mostly sits on it or goes over or around it; it does not go through. However, a kind of well can be built through limestone, whereby an underground stream flowing through an eroded limestone cavern may be accessed and its water gathered for our use. alternatively, an underground lake can be accessed if you know where it is and can find a way to drill down to it.

Even so, a lake is not an infinite source of water. Every lake, above ground or below, depends on a constant water supply. Above or below, lakes are replenished by streams, which are themselves ultimately replenished by rain or snow. Stop the rain, stop the snow or stop its melting, and the lake has only a short life. The smallest lakes, ponds, fed by seasonal streams, are only seasonal for this very reason.

Now, the Yucatan has underground lakes which are called cenotes (three syllables: se-note-es) and they treated as reservoirs for use during the dry season. So much is simple enough. If you can find the lake and find a way to open a passage to it, and if you can keep the passage clean and protected, then you can use it. In the Yucatan, such discoveries were the original condition of settlement.

But it was the further genius of the Mayans – and originally, we may be sure, of a particular Mayan hydrologist – that they not only found these underground waters but they followed up by building more. In areas that lacked cenotes, they built enormous underground, stone-lined cisterns called chultuns and figured out how to replenish them with carefully collected surface waters. A chultun could hold enough water to carry an average of 25 people through the dry season. It was filled by directing water from surface spaces that look like plazas or roads of some kind, but these plazas dip just slightly, just enough to direct the seasonal rains into the chultuns. These collection spaces were kept meticulously clean; there is no trash in them, and no waste of any kind is allowed in the area. You know, when we have an archeological dig, we discover where cooking was done and where waste was collected and where things that fell were simply left where they fell. The collection spaces for the cenotes may have been used for play during the dry season, but they were not used for any purpose that left trash.

We do not know the name of the man who designed the first chultun, but this sort of thing does not spontaneously “evolve.” Somebody has to think through the entire design, the entire task of waterproofing, and the whole task of directing clean water into an access that is protected from animals, dirt, and enemies. After all that, everybody has to cooperate with the construction and maintenance of the whole system. For people who lived by the collection of seasonal rains, this was their life.

I am sure that the process was taken in steps – early chultuns were doubtless smaller, and perhaps there was a period in which existing cenotes were strengthened. In that sense, the chultun would have been the work of several inventive minds over a period of time. But I want to emphasize that an integrated vision of this sort is the work of a clear mind focused on a definite problem.

We do not know the name behind that mind – the Mayan writings do not tell us that much. We have names of kings and their children, but, at least so far, we do not have the names of the hydrologists. Still, they lived, and they had names, and at some period, long ago, those names were celebrated.

Good grief.

It’s true, there’s something special about looking at the night sky when you can lie back and watch the majesty of the Milky Way and actually sense the infinity of the sky. Not because it actually is infinite; it is not. But because there is no visible parallax, the impression of infinity is inescapable and it is part of the way that the heavens declare the glory of God; they draw us to reflect on the infinite call that does lie within us.

What a pity that relatively few people can see this kind of sky; fogs and smogs and just ordinary clouds often hide this majestic scene, as do buildings and even forests.

It’s a good reason to visit the dry and even the desert lands of this country – just to get a lovely dark sky.

Meantime, however, the telescope has its own stories to tell, its images that are not available without the enhanced vision of our best technology. One of the 2011 images from Hubble is this lovely nebula from some distant corner of our own Milky Way.

Visions of angels visions in the heavens

It’s a star-forming region, a place where new stars are forming as we speak. There are many such, the most famous being the one on the sword of Orion. But this one, called Sharpless 2-106 is about 2,000 light years away, which is to say that the image we now on camera is a record of a light display that was unfolding 2,000 years ago. In this image, the young stars and the light of their birth are recorded as golden light, and the central figure with its background of red rays and trailing ribbons is the consequence of neighborhood dust. There are other images online in which the figure is turned 90º and the golden portion is blue, the usual coloration for young stars. These are more dramatic, but not available for blogs.

It’s the end of the season, the visit of the Magi. I wish you a blessed New Year.

Grosseteste lived from 1175 to 1253, entirely overlapping the life of St. Francis, whose Friars he taught at Oxford; remember, Roger Bacon was a Franciscan; he may or may not have actually met Grosseteste. He was also Bishop of Lincoln for the last 20 years of his life.

What else?

Well, it is interesting to note and he wrote an allegory about redemption called the Castle of Love. In his story, a king has four daughters, mercy, justice, truth, and peace, and they argue about the rightful fate of a guilty vassal. It’s an interesting approach to the doctrine of the atonement, and the fact that he wrote it is a measure of his desire to preach the gospel persuasively.

He was a good bishop.

He was a good statesman, which was part of the job of being a bishop in those days.

He was also an important philosopher, one who influenced Roger Bacon. Between 1230 and 1235, he wrote commentaries on Aristotle for his students, and one important aspect of this is that he certainly understood the dual path of scientific reasoning:

1. One generalizes from observations and comes to a conclusion about universal principles.
2. From that universal conclusion, one lays out what to expect in terms of observation and then checks whether new observations further affirm the universal principle or require its correction.

In other words, science requires both inductive reasoning, which goes from many observations to a single principle, and deductive reasoning, which goes from an abstract principle to the interpretation of many individual facts. He called inductive reasoning “resolution” since it brings many things into focus; he called deductive reasoning “composition” because it suggests how to place other physical events under the umbrella of a principle. Science consists of resolution and composition.

Seems obvious, but lesser men emphasize one path at the expense of the other. His ideas formed a tradition of placing science firmly in the realm of observation and experimental verification, and Galileo specifically built upon that tradition almost 400 years later.

Geometry and Optics

It is really impossible to think of studying optics without a knowledge of geometry. What is reflection if not geometry? Light strikes a flat surface, and the angle at which it falls is the same as the angle at which it bounces away: “the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.” Grosseteste wrote about optics and about the importance of math for good science.

He also wrote thoughtfully about the rainbow, although I don’t know exactly what he said because what I found about this quickly turned to a discussion of Roger Bacon’s development of his ideas. Nevertheless, he does seem to have understood the exciting possibilities opened up by an understanding of the principles of light:

“This part of optics, when well understood, shows us how we may make things a very long distance off appear as if placed very close, and large near things appear very small, and how we may make small things placed at a distance appear any size we want, so that it may be possible for us to read the smallest letters at incredible distances, or to count sand, or seed, or any sort of minute objects.”

In other words, he envisioned the twin invention of the telescope and microscope, still 350 years in the future.

When you notice how others have a habit of portraying the progress of scientific thought as a mental jump from the Greeks of 300 BC to the Renaissance of 1500 AD, think of Grosseteste. The medieval thinkers brought Greek thought into the Christian intellectual world, reflected on it, gave it a proper home, and developed it. They disagreed with Aristotle on some issues, but they thought about his ideas.

1. Submission to unworthy authority
2. The influence of custom
3. Popular prejudice
4. The concealment of one’s own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of knowledge.

The list is so delightfully complete:

1. When we submit to an authority whose vision doesn’t really reach as far as what he is assumed to know, we close our eyes to what is directly in front of us. This is true in politics, but also in science where, for example, the influence of Darwin has long prevented men from taking hold of the most obvious consequence of the discovery of chromosomes. Clearly, when species within a genus have different chromosome counts, it follows that the new species could not have evolved gene by gene, for a new chromosome always involves many genes.
2. You may think that science, dominated as it presently is by experiment, must be free of the influence of custom. But in fact, there was a whole generation after Einstein when his calculation of the speed of light was corroborated by one experimenter after another because they could not bring themselves to admit that they had found a different answer from the greatest physicist (as they thought) of the twentieth century. When someone finally printed his actual observations, a chorus of voices admitted their self-suppressed accord.
3. The deep assumptions of our time in history are hard to question. The evidence for a finite universe was obvious and under discussion for hundreds of years, but simply did not “take” in most men’s minds, because there was too strong an image of eternity in the stars and too strong an academic prejudice against a finite universe. LeMaitre was despised and scorned for his challenge to this prejudice, but it’s over now. The universe is finite in time. Oh, there are hold-outs, including Stephen Hawking; but the stranglehold of a prejudice against an eternal universe is broken.
4. Ahhh, humility! How many times, and in how many fields, do we noisily cover our vast ignorance with our little knowledge.

This list comes from Roger Bacon, 1214-1294, a medieval philosopher approximately contemporary with St. Thomas Aquinas, though a little longer-lived and born a little earlier.

Disambiguation!

For the sake of those who may faintly remember the name Francis Bacon, a little disambiguation is in order:

Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon were both:

• English philosophers
• Who emphasized the importance of observation
• And who therefore have each been considered the father of scientific method

Nevertheless, they differed profoundly:

• Roger Bacon was a Franciscan monk who lived in the 13^th century, a contemporary of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Robert Grossteste, and a famous and much-admired teacher at the University of Oxford and then the University of Paris. He wrote a treatise on magnetism that was the best work in the field for 300 years, until William Gilbert, a younger contemporary of Francis Bacon, took up the topic again.
• Francis Bacon, quite a worldly man, lived in the 16^th century, a contemporary of Shakespeare, Galileo, and Queen Elizabeth I. He retained royal favor during a period when Catholics were strongly persecuted, and his remarks about religion are consistent with that position. He is considered a believer because he wrote things like: “They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts in his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.”

Pathetic. If the main thrust of your argument for the existence of God is your own nobility, I can’t think of anything polite to say.

And despite whatever Francis Bacon said about experimental science, he never actually did any.

On page 307, we find an exchange between Harnack and Schlatter. Harnack, all full of the nicey-nice of the unbeliever says that they are really in agreement about everything except the small matter of miracles. Schlatter takes fire:

“No, we are divided on the question of God, for what is at stake in the question of miracles is in fact whether God is God or merely a part of the realm of subjectivity.”

That is exactly the point of miracles: that God has a personal initiative in the world and is not just the niceness at the core of (some) things. He is not just our best ideas, our highest ideals, our final hope. He isn’t just within us, though religious people do take their interior life seriously. God is always more than our interior life, much more. When the psychologists get through with saying that our whole interior life is just a construct, the religious people are not even fazed: what elements go into the weaving of the interior life is of no more significance than that our exterior life is partly made of jelly beans. God is still out there with initiatives, and we are still ourselves within, sharing his personal life through our own initiatives. We have an interior life that is real, and God comes to meet us as a real person – even with a face!

How gentle!

But also, going on to distinguish miracles from magic, notice how gentle the miracles are. Here is this face in Manoppello, as simple a face as ever there was, and it’s printed on a pretty amazing piece of cloth, but you don’t see right away that the fabric is amazing; you have to talk to a byssus-weaver to get it. So how many of us hang around chatting with byssus weavers?

None of us, that’s how many. There’s only one such artist left in all the wide world, diving in the sea to harvest anchor silk from the mussels and then taking it home to clean, treat, and weave it, a few grams at a time.

When you have magicians, all the energy is disorderly; it’s about power and display and selfishness. Disney has it. But miracles are about mercy, and if they disrupt anything at all, the scale is so small it cannot be measured.

In Cana, for example, 120 gallons of wine. OK, that’s a lot, but were there fireworks? No, and most of wine is water anyway. He did it without being noticed, and we know that because the steward didn’t even know where the wine was from.

The Church has a very careful way of looking at miracles as personal words of God. Nobody gets canonized just for a miracle, but when all the best judgments have been made about a person’s holiness and courage, the last word is with God: a miracle is requested as a sign of his initiative in desiring that we honor this person as his representative. And the miracle requested is not lightning and thunder; mostly it’s just a healing of somebody no one ever heard of, so they can go on with a life that most people will never notice.

But God notices, and so do their friends, and the friends also notice that God is our Father and friend. That’s the point.

And in Manopello, the miracle is the gentle miracle of an apparently simple face somehow imprinted in an incredibly fine sample of byssus silk. You can pass it by — or you can be captivated by it.

His conclusion was that there must have been tsunamis that reached several kilometers inland, and, in fact, he could date these inundations well enough to say that there were such tsunamis every 500 years or so reaching several kilometers into the Miyagi and Fukushima Prefectures. After a few research publications warning of the danger, and after many rebuffs, he was scheduled to give a presentation to officials in Fukushima on March 23 of this year.

On March 11, the disaster he would have warned of took place.

The kinds of changes now being proposed to safeguard against future disasters could have been initiated before so many lives were lost and before the unfolding of the radiation poisoning which is ongoing because Fukushima had nuclear reactors that were vulnerable to the combined earthquake-tsunami assault.

The release of radiation from the Japanese reactors has everyone so spooked about nuclear power that some would like to go back to coal, or wind and sun. Coal is dirty and limited. Japan does not have enough wind. South Dakota, where I live, has plenty of wind (usually) but it can be so fierce that installing wind power also involves protecting the wind vanes from the wind. This is expensive, and it means you need battery power to store the good wind both for windless days and for super-windy days. Wind and sun sound innocent enough, but they are not easy solutions, and even if there were no other difficulties, batteries are not made of wind. Thus, even wind power is highly technical and involves sophisticated materials; so does solar power.

Nuclear power is cheap and plentiful, and even Japan still wants it. What is necessary is a culture of truth in which a timely warning of danger can find its way to the right people. The information was there, but the vision to act on it lagged too far behind.

Even in the coastal towns, many people could have been saved from the tsunami had they understood their danger. They changed their clothes; they made phone calls that cost them their lives. Dr. Shishikura was prepared to explain the potential dangers to them, but…

Those who rebuild will know, but the threat will be distant for them. On the other hand, Dr. Shishikura says that the island of Shikoku is also at risk. Can they take time now to prepare?

More importantly, and for all of us, how do you build a culture of truth?

How can we possibly know, two billion years later, that the fission in Oklo lasted half an hour at a time and then stopped for a few hours? That seems completely absurd. Nobody was there; nobody could see; do scientists just make these things up for breakfast?

Well, we were not there, and we can’t figure out all the details of what happened, but the reason for thinking it worked this way is completely logical and it has to do with the isotopes of xenon which are left in aluminum phosphate crystals in these deposits. You can read about it for yourself if you want to work through all the ideas more thoroughly, but here is the main scheme:

Xenon is a noble gas, an unreactive element like helium, and it has several isotopes that are produced at different points during the normal breakdowns of radioactive uranium and its various “daughter” elements.

Note: When uranium breaks down it does not become a different isotope of uranium, but a different element altogether, depending on how it breaks. The daughter elements can be identified as uranium breakdown products because each element has one isotope that is, you might say, its own “original,” and a few others that come at the end of various breakdown paths.

As scientists were looking over the material in Oklo, they were surprised to find that the several xenon isotopes commonly found after nuclear fission were found here in very different proportions from the norm; in particular, there wasn’t enough xenon-136 or xenon-134. Where could they be? How come the others were dominant?

After some consideration, researchers realized that the missing xenon isotopes were the daughter isotopes of elements that are soluble in water. Perhaps some of these isotopes (radioactive tellurium and iodine) had been carried away by water seeping through the sandstones around the uranium. Perhaps some had been carried away before they broke down into xenon. This water was certainly present for the fission because it is important to the fission itself, but it boils away when things get hot, and then the fission stops. So apparently it works like this:

1. Fission begins,
2. Radioactive tellurium and then radioactive iodine are produced, as well as other elements.
3. These two elements quickly produce xenon-136 and xenon-134 but since they are water-soluble, they are partly off-site by the time these xenons turn up.
4. The water heats and boils away.
5. Fission stops.
6. Other xenon isotopes are produced as things begin to cool, and some are produced very much later, when everything is stone cold.
7. Aluminum phosphate crystallizes out during the cooling and locks the later xenon isotopes (or their radioactive parents) in its crystals. (Otherwise they would float away.)
8. When things are cool enough, the water seeps back in.
9. Fission begins again.

Half an hour of fission and a few hours of crystal formation are what it would take to have part of the xenon-136 and xenon-134 missing while xenon-132, -131, and -129 are locked in the aluminum phosphate.

Something like that. Totally unexpected, complicated, but tidy.

Nice detective work, eh?

Uranium has several different isotopes, mainly Uranium-238, which breaks down with a half-life of a few billions years, and Uranium-235 which is much more radioactive, breaking down at least 6 times faster. Odd that just three missing neutrons make such a difference, for that is all that distinguishes the two forms, but it has another effect as well:  the nucleus of a uranium-235 atom is unstable and apt to split if it is disturbed. All it takes is one wandering neutron, which might come from the natural radioactivity of either isotope or one of its breakdown products, and bam! — the uranium-235 can suddenly break into a couple of smaller unstable atoms, which may break down again, and their breakdowns yet again. Some of these breakdowns throw off neutrons, which, if there’s more uranium-235 in the area, can set off yet more chains of breakdown. All this breaking up is called fission and it can make the neighborhood quite hot if there’s enough of it. Interestingly, because the rate at which this series of decays takes place, the proportions of the fission-formed elements can tell us how long it’s been since the uranium-235 underwent a fission reaction.

At Oklo, it was 2 billion years ago. It was a rather lazy event, probably lasting half an hour at a time, cooling for few hours, and then continuing. And yes, it went on for maybe 200 million years.

Thus, the Oklo reactor was a natural event, and it produced its heat and died down again before men walked on the earth, before dinosaurs walked on the earth, before the shellfish left their households in the soil of Italy, and even before the trilobites who swam around for 250 million years and then died, leaving the sea to the fishes. All the animals we know go back maybe half a billion years, but the blue-green algae go back 3 billion years, and they were there to see Oklo. (Well, they didn’t have eyes.)

Where from, and why then?

The uranium came up from below, nobody knows how far below the crust of the earth, and spread over the edge of the Congo Craton of Africa, to which, incidentally, Brazil was still attached. At this time in the history of the world, the Great Oxygen Event was unfolding, when oxygen first became abundant in the atmosphere, apparently through the action of the blue-green algae, also called blue-green bacteria.

Incidentally, this surplus of oxygen had two very interesting effects:

1.   Oxygen reacted with iron in the water and laid down the banded iron formations which later gave the Bragas of Brazil their living.

2.   By reacting with the greenhouse gas, methane, already in the atmosphere, the new oxygen set off a worldwide glaciation, the Huronian, which very nearly brought life to a dead halt on earth before there were any footed creatures at all to walk its lands.

These amazing events belong to just this one period in earth’s history and they cannot happen again that way.

But the new flush of oxygen in those distant days was important to the uranium, too, because it allowed the formation of uranium oxides, which are water-soluble, and this allowed the uranium to be carried from one place to another. The place where the water dropped it, in Gabon, Africa, became a vast uranium deposit and is now a uranium mine. (Presumably, there are also uranium deposits “in” Brazil, but if so, they are probably 18-20 km underground, and are impossible to mine.)

It was in the context of mining operations in Gabon that the traces of this ancient, natural fission reaction were discovered in 1972, and an effort to understand their origin was slowly launched.

In the case of the wine of Cana, we and St. John are on the same page and bring the same experience to the story: wine is mostly water, but water is not wine, and good wine is not made quickly even from the best of grapes. Our experience is the same as St. John’s and what he is proposing for our belief is something he must have found hard to believe, or at least most astonishing, himself. He was there, so that helped him, but he did know the unlikelihood of it, which was the precisely the same for him and for us.

But for the Third Day of Creation, the situation is quite different. What we and the author of Genesis bring to this verse of the Bible are very different. Creation itself is astonishing; in that we are the same. But, on a creationist interpretation, what are we to think of grass that must be green without the sun? You may answer that there was light on the first day, but what sort of light was that when there were no stars? Was it electromagnetic radiation like the light we know now? If so, something had to radiate it; what? If not, then was it a spiritual light, not really what we mean by light, but something analogous? And if so then how did it support the activity of chlorophyll in the leaves?

One might imagine that the grass was there but was white until the fourth day when the sun turned up. But that is not so easy, because grass cannot even grow or stand up straight without the energy that is packed up by chlorophyll in the sunshine. You could reply that God could have kept the grass in a mature state, either white or green, whichever he chose, until he made the sun. God can do anything.

Yes, God can do anything, but the question I ask the creationist is: what is being proposed for our belief? That all the green herbs and flowering plants were created in mature but bleached form and then waited for the sun of the fourth day? Or that all were created only as seeds, waiting for the fourth day to sprout? Or that they were created mature and green, but static, only reaching active stature on the fourth day?

Not that it matters, but the point is, what are we talking about? What is it that we are asked to believe? None of the problems I have listed were within the consciousness of the sacred writer. It took him no extra leap of faith to deal these logical consequences of the Genesis sequence, because he was not aware of them. God made the land and its plants: fine. In that case, what he understood himself to be proposing for our act of faith is not the same as what a creationist asks us to believe a few thousand years later. In the case of the wine, it is the same. Even in the case of the Resurrection is it the same, for the deadness of dead bodies is not a new idea; modern medicine does not change it. But for the creationist interpretation of Genesis, it is not clear what is proposed for our belief, and whatever it is, the Genesis author was not conscious of it.

Of course being able to distinguish two types of miracles does not mean one kind did not happen. God can do anything.

But the issue remains: if you cannot tell me what I am supposed to believe, then you cannot fault me for not believing it. I believe that God designed everything with infinite wisdom, and that He is fully aware of every detail of the outworking of even the most law-bound processes. Within Catholic doctrine, that suffices for the Third Day. Whether it took place over a few hundred million years, and whether a good number of animals (such as bees) were actually also created at the same time as the plants they pollinated is of no consequence.

In that interpretation, what is proposed for our belief – that our Father did it all, right to the last apple blossom – is the same for us and for the author of Genesis. Seems only fair.