I’m reading a great book right now: astronomer Mike Brown’s neat memoir How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. This is the guy who discovered something larger than Pluto, setting into motion the controversial 2006 reclassification of the former ninth planet as a dwarf planet.
Lots of good science, written for the thoughtful non-scientist, interwoven with bits of his life story: grad school, courting, marriage, and baby daughter. Some hijinx from the scientific community, too.
Brown explains the back story behind the search for planets in the outer solar system–Pluto’s neighborhood and beyond. The Caltech scientist meets his future wife in the basement of the Mount Palomar Observatory. How cool is that?
This is a highly recommended read, especially for the inside human side of science.
I recently finished Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail, a slightly less impressive book. Less impressive than his previous Culture novels.
At first glance, this book appears to have a theological relevance. There are computer-simulated hells to which the disembodied consciousnesses of dead persons are sent.
Unbeknownst to her, one character has a “recording device” planted into her brain as a young woman, and when she dies, the device broadcasts her personality, memories, skills, and such across interstellar space to a Culture ship.
This, of course, isn’t theology. It’s just technology.
Over the years, I’ve read almost every Culture novel, mostly in order of appearance. It’s a challenge for an author to create what is essentially an anarchic utopia, where citizens are unencumbered by poverty, accidental death, constructions not only on their freedoms, but also their whims.
In the Culture novels, the conflict is from outside this safe society of thirty trillion: what happens when people outside the Culture do bad things, or when individuals within the Culture have to break their own rules to protect a greater good?
A non-Culture society sets up and promotes virtual reality hells. Under the shadow of controversy about this, it is decided to hold a VR war to determine the fate of hell: to abolish them or continue them. One side, however, decides to cheat.
Banks wrote a slew of Culture novels in the 90′s. He’s recently brought out two, this one, and Matter (2008). I found the latter very difficult to get going. A caution: any review is necessarily subjective, even by my own standards. I’ve been reading mostly sf short stories the past few months, so my patience with more complex novels and their slower start-up routines may be tested. I like Iain Banks and his work. Maybe he’s set high standards that I don’t see being met in these later books.
My main problem with the Culture is that its society as a whole seems to produce a boring sameness of indulgence and materialism. And even the exceptions, those agents whose missions make up the stories of the Culture novels, they all seem rather the same, too. The concepts are really interesting, usually. Though a virtual reality afterlife is an extremely tame idea compared to alien artifacts, galactic-scale warfare, or even a doctor of a king on a backward planet. The setting almost seems to be a smarmy nod to religion: let me set up some gods and hells and show you how faith doesn’t work.
Surface Detail also involves a manufactured fleet of three-hundred million warships, but that’s far from the centerpiece of the story. The Culture deals with it as easily as a leafblower, a rake, and a match will resolve November tree litter in a backyard.
In his novels, Iain Banks has created one large character, the Culture itself. That character is untouchable, unmovable, incorruptible. So I ask: where’s the needful conflict to get a large novel moving? Sometimes things are too perfect. And no amount of grisly violence can resolve that.
In a way, the Culture has an analogue in Christian fiction. Like God, it can never be touched or moved. Real three-dimensional characters will always be more interesting. But if you’ve never read a Culture novel, I strongly recommend reading at least one. Banks is an outstanding author who, just from my perspective, seems to be in some sort of slump.
The last surviving Martian rover, Opportunity, is still roving
Wave the checkered flag for the solar system’s eighth planet. Since its 1846 discovery by a combination of mathematics and international cooperation, Neptune has completed one orbit of the sun, as of yesterday.
Thom Patterson at CNN blogs on “The surprising history of prayer in space.” 
Don’t look now, but the 
22 July 2011
What Copernicus and Kepler Can Teach Us About Clergy Abuse
Posted by catholicsensibility under Astronomy, Commentary[7] Comments
Retrograde motion–the observation that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn occasionally backtrack in their movement against the background stars–was an early problem for the theory (simply illustrated above where the Earth is the red dot in the middle) that the Earth was the center of the universe. The problem could be solved if each planet was on its own sub-track, an epicycle. The planet and its little circle would continue on its way around the Earth. But when it was tracking in the opposite direction from its usual motion, Ptolemy and other ancient astronomers claimed it was just because epicycle movement “backward” overcame its usual progress in the heavens. This web site illustrates it extremely well.
In the decades before and after 1600, Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, had a simpler explanation: no epicycles, and all the planets orbit the sun, and the various subtleties of their apparent motion can be explained–and predicted–mathematically. (Galileo, of course, found moons orbiting Jupiter just as the ancients correctly surmised that the moon orbits the Earth. That finding helped move along the eventual acceptance of his fellow scientists’ insights.
What do these guys have to do with clergy sexual abuse and its cover-up by the bishops? I liken the Jay Study and recent commentary on it to the situation of medieval astronomy, before Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. Like the ancients we see the planets move through the sky. Also like the ancients we also misdiagnose what we see. The smart ones among us invent contrived explanations (loneliness, homosexuality, the 60′s) for what we witness among people who should be paragons of holiness and virtue.
At the recent dotCommonweal thread I commented on the Frawley-O’Dea assessment of the Jay study. It strikes me many Catholics aren’t completely satisfied with seeing epicycles explain clergy abuse and bishops covering up. There should be a simpler, yet more subtle explanation here. It’s more than the 60′s. It’s more than loneliness. It’s more than a loss of a sense of sin, or homosexuality, or seductive teens. Certainly, one priest (at least) lost his way in the 60′s, one gay priest happened to abuse children, some adolescent somewhere has seduced a priest, some lonely guy turned to child porn and a real kid, and maybe all of them sinned in spite of “knowing” the right and the wrong of it all.
But it doesn’t explain why twenty, thirty, fifty percent or more of bishops covered it up. It doesn’t explain why significantly large numbers of priests preyed on children.
My own sense–and you longtime readers here know this is my soapbox–is that sex abuse and its institutional cover-up has a strong whiff of addiction. Maybe you can explain abusive clergy as lonely guys pining away for self-satisfaction, but what about bishops? I wouldn’t be naive enough to think every instance of abuse and cover-up can be explained away by sexual addiction and codependency. But at the very least, persons expert in addiction should be consulted in any serious study.
We know that the demands of ministry–and I speak of both laity and clergy–are prime environments for many of us to gain weight (my hand is up), indulge in alcohol or drugs, have affairs or be tempted by sex, or act out emotionally through anger, controlling behaviors, intimidation, passive aggressiveness, etc..
Speaking for myself, I didn’t become forty pounds overweight because parishioners were too demanding, or the priest was unfair, or because I didn’t get the down time I wanted. Or that I was lonely. Or that the meanies in the culturewar were bugging me.
I have to concede I have a predilection to addictive behavior. I have to watch myself carefully. With God’s help, I will never be overweight again. But I can own up to the situation for what it is, and I don’t have to blame the fast food industry, promoters of HFCS, my family of origin, or the time demands of parish liturgy.
Getting back to the Church’s crisis, sexual abuse in many cases may be a result of an addictive inclination, immaturity, emotional upheaval, and a lack of support for a healthy lifestyle that combine in various ways to subvert vulnerable people. The assessment from Jay and other researchers that it is hard to predict who will be an abuser indicates multiple possible factors. That leads me to think this whole mess is something a lot closer to how and why people become addicts. One simple system. A host of subtleties we scarcely understand.
This tack should be more seriously examined. And until future studies include experts in addiction as part of the task force, I will read future work on this with a dollop of doubt–at least in terms of grasping the whole picture.
The Jay Study strikes me as akin to primitive science. Ptolemy’s epicycles explained planetary motion, but in a somewhat contorted way. It wasn’t until Copernicus forwarded the notion that the planets orbited the sun–not Earth, and Kepler refined laws of planetary orbits, that the intricacies of what we observed in the skies was largely and logically explained.
I think we’re in a similar situation today. We’re about as advanced in the understanding of sex abuse and cover-up as medieval astronomers were in their field. There are reasons why clergy abuse and their bishops cover up. We just don’t grasp the whole picture yet. My hope is that the Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler of psychopathology has been born already and somewhere is piecing together the strands of this. If not, I fear we’re going to continue to languish in the Dark Ages, to the detriment of the Gospel itself.