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in vietnam, his career in journalism and killing christ, a vietnam war history. then 10:00 p.m. eastern on "aftwards", ruth shares her journey from poverty. they and m university in her book at home. she's interview by author -- watch book tv every sunday on c-span2. ♪♪ plentiful schedule on your program guide watch online anytime. ♪♪ religious and an astronomer and physicist whose area of research is asteroids and meteorites. he is a member and leader of several professional organizations such as the international astronomical union. the author of several books, a

popular science writer and public speaker and, frequent university professor and lecturer originally from detroit. brother guy is an alumnus of, mit and the university of arizona who interrupted his studies serve two years in the peace corps. volunteer teaching physics and astronomy in kenya. so he too has a beer spirit of adventure and exploration. brother guy is the worthy recipient, numerous honors, not least of which was being named by pope francis eight years ago to be director of the vatican, headquartered at castelli gandolfo in italy and president. the vatican observatory foundation based in phenix, arizona. his honors include the carl sagan medal for outstanding communications by a planetary scientist to the general. we'll see about that today. and he's been nominated for a very rare honor to have an asteroid named after him.

brother guy, welcome. the historic central library of los angeles. and thank you for joining in honoring the namesake of the north hollywood regional library by delivering the first amelia earhart lecture in adventure and the stage is yours. it means in 20. so there was some creative storytelling, right. there is a that this is up here we go. we'll go and should ring up if we're lucky this should ring up if we're lucky. there we are. thank heavens i'm brother guy consolmagno. as you heard, the director of the vatican observatory that's me. i'm in the picture in skellig michael, which is 1002 year old monastery off the coast of, kerry in ireland, which where

they have a dark sky sight. my research is meteorites, you know, the rocks that fall out of the sky in the asteroids that they come from. i came to skellig michael to celebrate the brothers, the religious brothers, like who dedicated their lives, the worship of god in the fact that it's a spectacular place to visit made it all the more attractive. and the fact that it was where. they filmed the most recent star wars movies also had a little bit to do with why i like being there. i am, as you heard an author, i've got a coming out the end of september called when science goes wrong and the subtitle is the the desire and the search for truth, which raises an interesting question how do you write a book about science, not a book of science, but a book about science? how do you write a book about

truth? both of those are kind of hard to get your hands around, hard to. but it's not the first time that i was faced with this issue back in 1987. and old buddy of mine from the university of arizona, we classmates together in planetary science, the other guy with the wild hair, cliff stoll, had found hackers breaking into computers when he was working the lawrence berkeley labs. it turns out they were spies for the soviet union who thought they were in the lawrence livermore lab computers. very different kinds of places. one of them explores subatomic particles. the other explores how to build bombs and he somebody oh, you're about to write this up. he wrote up a serious and how you find hackers in a computer and he sent it off to an agent the agent said cliff this is the boring thing i can imagine. go away. and then it made the front page

of the new york in the agent called afternoon and said cliff i've got 20 different publishers looking for we're going to auction off the rights can you write a and cliff goes i'm not a better writer today than i was yesterday you can go ahead. you write the book. i'll sell it. he had no idea how to write a book which i was bizarre because cliff is one of the most fantastic i'd ever come across in my life. and i said, cliff, don't give the details tell stories now. i didn't get that because i was so, but because i had seen that done in this book sort of the new machine by a guy named, tracy kidder, who wrote a bestseller book about a computer and not even a very good computer a data general nova three computer. and i used to use those. we weren't going to go into the problems had because what he

realized is you don't tell stories you don't do you don't write truth. you tell stories about and the way you tell stories about is by telling stories about people. so cliff up writing his book about the people he encountered including a wonderful fictional a character he totally made up in his book called cliff stole. and he would to the cliff character and what cliff character is going to do next because that was the way he could tell stories about himself and my own book and when science goes wrong facing the same starts with a story. that was the story i told when the first part of this was published in the journal and magazine called the tablet. the story of a whose son in law died of covid and whose last to his teenage daughters was i'm sorry i didn't get the vaccine

then can explore why good sensible people were of the vaccine why people be overselling the science or underselling the science from that story. you can see human importance of understanding what science is and isn't what it can and cannot do. this whole idea of storytelling to me come from it naturally. my father taught the art of storytelling, that he learned his uncles who were all in vaudeville in the 1920s and thirties, but at some part i had forgotten that. so let me tell you a little bit of my story of how i got into this. i love science fiction. i'm a nerd. so it comes naturally before. i was a scientist before i was a jesuit i was a wannabe science writer. i wanted to be a story. in 1970, i a college freshman at boston college liberal arts

major, my creative writing instructor said, you know, if you want to read, write stories, you should read well-written stories. and he suggested the narnia books. now, i was just old enough that i had never heard of the narnia books in fact when i was a kid, i was even a bigger nerd mostly back in those days. i didn't even like fantasy books, wanted books with facts kind of like the eustace character in narnia that boy did. i relate to him. so it's not surprising that i'd never heard of the number of good books, but my best friend from high school had also gone off to boston with me, but he was studying physics at mit and he was a member of. the m.i.t. science fiction. so every weekend go out and hang out with him. and i discovered the misfits library and there were i found

copies of the narnia. i'm 18 years old. i discovered for the first time i'm concentrating on the author's technique more than the content. but i discovered that this had a remarkable effect. me it wasn't the fact that they were christian. you know, obviously were christian. you can tell that if you're 18 years old, it might be snuck when you're 12 or eight. but i was still a practicing back in those days. so, you know being christian didn't bother me. i wasn't surprised to find myself up in the adventures because that's what they were written for to make them adventure. but confluence of those two things made me realize for the first time that, you know, being a christian, a great adventure, it was as exciting as any fantasy story and that sense it finally got me to realize that fantasy is based on truth truth. fantasies only work if they're true, not in the details, but if

they're true to the human spirit, if they're true to the issues that we actually have to face, if they can get us to face those issues in a different way, to see them a point of view we hadn't seen before. another thing happened when i was reading the narnia in the midst of the library, i discovered that it's a library and i said, this is the world's largest collection of science fiction books, and this is a whole lot more fun being a history major at boston college. so i started plotting how i was going to transfer to mit. i wound up colleges, i wound up changing. i'm changing my vocation mostly so i could read science fiction books. ultimately, instead of reading and writing stories set on planets, i wound reading and writing about planets themselves. now, i also did learn something about storytelling, just like the instructor has suggested. i read a lot of science books,

fiction books since then with kind of a analytical mind. and i wound up trying to systemize, what is it that i look for when i want to read a story three things, show me something i haven't seen before. keep the novel in novel. secondly, make me turn pages. there are many science books and fantasies which i have started and thought to myself, wow, this is fab illustrated, this is fabulous. is world building. wow, what an intricate while. some of these days want to get back and finish this book. and the third is be honest. as i say fantasy has to be honest even if it is a fantastic world the truth that it tells have to be real truth. the curious thing is, on

reflection also what i'm looking for when i read a science paper, i want to see something i haven't seen before. i want to see something interesting enough that i go through the equations and it had better be the truth. that's what it's all about. but then that's what i'm looking for when i'm doing the jesuit bit of trying to be closer to god. first, show me something new novelty is essential. without it, there was no novel. one of the worst crimes in science is also the published work that's already been done. finding something and new hidden among the mundane is also the pattern of how we experience god in the real world. next, make me turn the pages like the narnia books. there's got to be an underlying sense of the joy, even if there's a sense of tragedy. some get something me to make me turn the pages that joy is a

sign of god's presence. and it also is what makes scientific work interesting enough to make you to want to do it every day incidentally, i have talk about why i chose that cover of stories. the cover story is called the skylark of space and it was the first science fiction story that i know that was set on a planet around another star in the same issue is an adventure of. a fellow who is trapped after world war one in a cave for 500 years and came back. and his name was anthony rogers. but they turned to buck rogers when they made it into a movie. yeah, i'd realize that make you look at the universe the universe we know but in a new and exciting way you. yes oh thank you. even if you're an atheist, if you're a storyteller or if

you're a scientist, your goal is the truth. but if you are a believer, having that goal is really even more important because truth better be evidence of god's a true story and honest story has believable characters going through actions that may be surprising, but ultimately they feel right. you know, when you go, i never saw coming, but yeah, that's what would happen. whether it's frodo and gollum when they get to mount doom or any other mystery story where you're bamboozled until you get to the oh of course i should have seen it all along. and of what's a bad story is when they shove characters to do what the author wants them do. and you going, yeah, i don't think so real life isn't like that. it doesn't have to be about people that. you would agree with really is full of people who you love doing things that you wish they hadn't done. if we didn't love them, we

wouldn't care. but but it reminds me that, you know when you're young, you hear the church the time saying, don't do that. but when you're older, you realize your church or your parents have been saying, oh, don't do that. we've been there there. a story that shoves its characters around to fit some preconceived outcome isn't honest. a story that shows you reasonable, understandable even if they turn out to be regrettable decisions is ones that allows you to then think about the implication of the decisions we're making in our own lives and. if you find a character you love doing something you wish they had and maybe that'll help you be a little more generous to. your friends who do things when you really wish they hadn't. it's in storytelling. we get most quickly to that truth. our philosophy, our ethics, ultimately our religion doesn't

exist just in books of philosophy. it lives in a lived context that means story. that means the philosopher christina baber lake in a book called prophets the post-human says stories, point us to the kinds of cells we can be, and they help determine the ethical appropriateness of our actions. for example, consider your heart issue, the ethical implications of biotechnology in mails for gossip in science fiction stories by lois mcmaster, brugel we show are shown a number of diverse effects, good and bad that arise from one case uterine replicators. if you're pregnant, you just pop it out, put it in a box, come back. nine months later, you've got a baby and you haven't had to worry about all the, you know, inconveniences of that thing. what are the implications for something like that? what the startling implications of genetic enhancements of human

embryos? well, the philosopher christopher causer defense of dignity, discusses kind of topic. he has great he's got great clarity of. and it's important to have these scholarly perspectives. but his book doesn't have them come alive they way they do in the bogosian books. her books are science fiction novels. they give a context to those ideas. they're centered around people. i can believe really what act the way they do whether i agree with them or not, given the circumstances they are and they're fun to read. now, the thing to remember is that these are space operas. they're not philosopher b, they make no pretense to how so? being high literature by design, they're page. they follow the adventures of highly unusual heroes doing, you know, crazy things, highly unusual sidekicks. they've got these garish covers. the plots are full of derring do

in bushel piles, disaster in dignity, honor, hero, in a way the reader can endure only because know that somehow it's all going to turn out right by the last page, which it always does. and the charm of the stories is actually how the author is going lure you into believing one absurdity after another. and yet, in the process, she sneaks in some pretty profound moral issues seeing and in the context of a story, let's test the idea you can relate it to the issues of the story and then you can relate that to things in our own daily lives at, the same time observing deep issues at the remove of a story you know set a long time in a galaxy far far away can help drop the defensiveness and the prejudices that might be blind us from seeing these things clearly in

our own lives. it's no accident that the gospels of the heart of christians scripture are stories, not theological discourses. we can hear a story evaluator against our own human experience, question it and instinct draw lessons from it. i mean, when you go to church and you hear st paul's epistles and there's just so many words fly over your head, you don't remember it at the after the reader has stopped reading it. the gospel stories you remember cause their stories. sometimes the questions that come up aren't necessarily the questions that the gospel writer thought about. i remember somebody hearing, the story of the prodigal son and going, okay, so he goes back to. his father, who's taking care of the pigs, never mind. there's a mother function of making a point, a story that derives from the fact that scripture was written, a time when most people couldn't read.

and so the only heard scripture read to them out loud and you might only hear a story once every three years. much of ancient literature was created to address a problem that, for the most part, we don't have anymore, which is to communicate ideas in that are in the written word to people who can't read. nowadays, almost everybody can. since the invention of the printing press, you're never too far from a book or a library full of books. but in ancient times, people who could read were rare books themselves. rare people could only from what they heard. you usually what was read to them in a church or a synagogue by the one guy in the village who knew how to read. but in fact that same challenge occurs, when we present our science to work, whether it's at or popular settings. how did you do that? how did you get people to

remember you have books written with hooks that make the message memorable, something you're not going to affect forget, even if you only hear it once a year or once every three years. the important information and the truth that scripture or a scientific paper is going to convey you about who we are, how we should live is communicated in stories. but even then, the that we hear from scripture, the stories had been written down and the process writing changes things. there was a jesuit scholar, walter, who wrote a book on reality and literacy, and he described how structure is a product of the shift from oral traditions to written word, a shift that arguably was necessary for the rise science, he says. writing restructures the very reflex deafness of writing enforced by the slowness of the writing process as compared to

oral delivery as well by the isolation of the author compared to an oral performer, encourages growth of consciousness of the unconscious, is to say, writing it down makes you think about it. that's one of the reasons why even we presented our scientific ideas at a meeting. you still have to do work of writing it on paper. if nothing else, it confront makes you confront and express all of the assumptions that you made when you were telling the story, when you were doing the science. more than that, since aristotle, we've had an idea of how stories work. and i would say that ideas also can tell us something about how our science works, how our faith works. this this idea goes back to but it can be found in the classic great pyramid. and i found this wonderful picture on internet, which i

think expresses it pretty. well, it was devised by the 19th german 19th century german playwright gustav freitag and. it says there are five elements again goes to aristotle. there's exposition, rising action, climax falling action. and while so the story with an exposition of where are we, who are the protagonists who are the that we can care about what the place we can relate to the or the poor orphan with a funny scar living under the stairs or the peaceful countryside with a lovable, lovable hammett's story, lurie's in with a problem, a conflict, a mystery it makes you want to know what happens next. what happens when the visit wizard visits the orphan, when the wizard visits the habits and drags them away from home, then the story has a central point when the main character has make

a crucial decision, when uncovers the key piece of information and everything that you thought you knew changed, and that decision that information. the main moment has consequences. it matters. you know how it matters within the realm of the story, because we've given the set up about the first place in the first place back when the book began. so we know about the evil wizard who's trying to set the world or has the evil ring or whatever whatever. but it also matters outside of the context of the story to us, because we can see the connection in to our lives, in our fight, and worry good and evil. we have to see how the decision out. and that's what keeps us turning the. and then we come to the end the resolution of the dilemma sometimes story forget to do this you may have seen movie the

martian. you may have heard the book. one of the differences is the movie ends it in a dilemma that the book forgot to have because the author was first time author for a story to satisfy you need to have a moment at end when you can step back, catch your taken the scenery, look over the landscape. now we're never middle earth we'll never be the same where there's now a new generation going off to hogwarts the same thing happens in a scientific paper, any kind of academic paper you need the same parts you have to describe the problem you have to describe. it's a problem you have to describe why you needed that clever or or special thing that you did you have to describe what your brilliant country view should was and how it changes what you had seen before. and then, most importantly, you have to be able to sit back, catch your breath, show how understanding of this problem is

different it had seen before, and why ought to get funded again for the next year's problem problem. all right. so there was a parallel. so so what? that's cute. what does it tell us? here's a bold assertion. here's something i'm going to say about storytelling and science if it's bad storytelling, probably bad science. if you don't have all the elements place, you're missing something essential in your argument. essential because without it, it might not be true. think of the scientific paper. if you don't have a good, that means you haven't read literature. you don't know what the rest of the scientific world has been doing all along. you established a common ground that you can speak to the other scientists over if you don't have rising action you haven't articulated why it was a problem. why you bother doing this work? playing in the lab isn't the

same as doing science. if you don't know and articulate why you were doing this, then you have no way of judging if what you've done was worthwhile, or even if it got you anywhere without the classic breakthrough. the crucial insight there, no point to your paper. the falling is where you show the rest of us your insight why it made a difference how it makes a difference because science is more than the data science is what you have learned from the data. it's not just data, it's understanding only. then can you arrive at new knowledge. if you don't have all of those elements, including the last, where you can sit back and say, you know why it works, then you don't have a complete story. if you don't have a complete story, it's not good science. we can learn something else.

storytelling, which is a lot. the elements that go into good storytelling are essential for good science. i have a friend, teresa nielsen, hayden she's an editor at tori books and science fiction. she also teaches something called invisible, viable paradise is that invisible? viable, paradise which is a workshop for science fiction. and she used to run a blog called making light, which i swiped this from. and at one point she talked about four item formula for writing fiction move and make it keep moving, which is to say, tell the sto you want to tell. don't chelly around, make it consequential have later events in the story be caused by what happened in the earlier events recycle your characters give preference to characters you've already created, give preference to things you've already used. and finally, if you already have one, which is to say whenever need something new, whenever you need something to to make the story continue like a prop or

plot thread, go back to what you've already written and see if it's actually sitting at you in plain sight. do you guys remember the movie. oh, i can't remember the title of it. the the yellow volkswagen bus with the little girl who's going to be one of miss sunshine. thank you. i happened to be in australia trying to do some observe thing and we were stuck with 12 days of rain. so i saw that movie many times waiting for the rain to clear, including the director's cuts. and they were describing how there was a scene where they were pulled over by the police and the cop opens the trunk and there is the dead body. i hope i'm not spoiling the book. and as writers, they had idea how to get themselves out of that and suddenly they realize. is that a throwaway joke they had introduced earlier in the film gave them way out of it. see, if you already have one.

okay. look, look. let's see how this works in move and keep moving. you can't move and keep moving unless there's a place you're moving to and you need know what you're trying to get to when you're moving. you don't write a good story without. having some reason for writing it a plot idea, a character sometimes is just a setting that want to be in. sometimes can be nothing more than a picture. this is, of course what c.s. lewis wrote about how wrote the narnia books he started with this picture, whatever it is, the opening of the story has to serve reason you have for writing the story next tell the story without shilly shallying about you know something really cool happens chapter three. but your writer doesn't know that unless you give reason to think that there will be something cool happening with the promise of more to come. you got to get them to turn the pages once told them that

something cool is coming, you'd better deliver something cool but that's that's a different issue make it consequential have later events because they're motivated or shaped by earlier ones casual causal or consequential link is like theresa says i feel cable holding the narrative together or the string holding a rosary together. actually theresa is also a beta and made this rosary actually she's a catholic as it happens, as recycling characters, you know, when your people in later events preference to the characters, you've already got, see if you've already got one. so if you need new we talked about that. that was about writing a story. how does that fit in science? what's the scientific equivalent move and keep moving? no. what it is you're trying to do have a clearer idea of the bit of information you want to get across, concentrate on getting to. i'll tell you a truth about

science. not even in the text here. you're probably taught the method. maybe in grade school a scientist sees a problem, devises hypotheses, invents experiment. science isn't actually done that way you get a new hammer, you pound on everything until it breaks you see all the pieces. you know that you've got a meeting in two months. you have to write an abstract for it and then you try to figure out what have i learned from breaking all these things with this new hammer that that being the case, you still have to turn that experience into a coherent story that follows these points a lot of the creativity of science is realizing. wait a minute i just solved the problem that may not even have realized was a. so you've got, you know, randall monroe, the author of the x making fun of a particular kind of science that's infamous string theory, which is a really cool idea.

they haven't quite figured out what it's supposed to do yet. the laboratory version of that is, to make a measurement that's easy to do, but doesn't actually tell you what you want to know make bill cool, doesn't you anywhere. that's silly. shallying let me give you an example. if you want to know how a meteorite breaks up when it hits the earth's atmosphere, you have to know how strong the meteorite is. so which is to say you want to know where that point is. now to put a meteorite in a lab, break it up makes me really with meteorite curators because they would like to have that piece back when. i was done so very few people make that measurement instead. what they wind up making a measurement of is the young's modulus, which you can do without breaking the meteorite which is great. then you can publish numbers. the only trouble is it doesn't actually you what you wanted to know until you're clever enough realize. well, maybe there is problem that that's a solution to.

making a consequential make each point fit with the next next. years ago i was a grad student before voyager went to uranus and neptune. i heard a talk by one of the grand old men in the field who's actually wealthy. he's used grander and older, but he had done several careful experiments try to come up with the rotation period of neptune, and he talked for half an hour about all the different ways that people had measured the rotation period of neptune. and finally, this hotshot scientist in the back of the room, not me, gets up and says, yes, doctor, i've got a question. so what? who cares what? the rotation period of neptune is, it turns. there are reasons why you might want a but he had forgotten to tell us those. and without that you're sitting in the audience going like, why am i suffering through this? you know, this is the this is the solution. and you, the criminal, you forgot to me what he had done,

that he made him a criminal. it's like a mystery novel where. you never found out who got murdered. sometimes consequence gets misunderstood. there's this wonderful young adult fantasy series which has the unfortunate. you know, she was a young writer when she wrote it that our heroes saved entire universe in book one. what's left for them to do for the rest of the 20 books that she wound up writing? you know? one of the amazing things about j.k. rowling is she got that right and she was able to come up with a series that had a limited beginning and end and had the stakes rise higher and higher for each book. so that you did keep turning the pages to find out not an insignificant bit of story telling in a story i care more about the fate of an interesting character than i care about the

fate of the universe. you know, the universe has gotten gotten along just fine without me worrying about it, but my friend. i want to know what's going to happen to them, frankly, i also trust a whole lot more, some author's idea about a person than some authors idea about the universe universe. i would rather a scientific paper that takes a small but interesting puzzle and works it out completely rather than one that finds, you know, pieces of data and one green in the meteorite and out of that tries to draw tremendous conclusions about how the solar system was formed. doesn't work that way. that's another example of bad science, is bad storytelling. and also one of the hardest things about being a scientist is to find a problem that's big enough to be interesting but small that i can actually solve it. you know, in the three years that i've got a grant. but this sense consequential

raises the deeper question why are we doing why do we do science? do we write stories? why do read stories all that to the side? what are the consequences of that. meanwhile, step three, step four recycle your characters. see if you already have one. keep it simple. you don't want. to introduce new hypotheses when you can actually use one that's at hand. we call occam's razor in bertrand russell's formulation whenever possible substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences rather than unknown entities you don't want to date ex machina, you don't want to. god is going to come out of the machinery at the end of the story and fix everything because that's bad storytelling. if bad storytelling is it also bad religion? does that apply to our lives of faith? move and keep it moving. shilly shallying. okay if you're interested in

god, if you think god might be talking to, don't wait until next sunday. this sunday, don't wait until you're in a quiet place. don't wait for the end of. this talk. be aware of god's talking to you right now. maybe, and it certainly isn't my voice. you can tell the difference. for me at least the decision try to get in touch with god. however, you could do it isn't the end of the story. it's not even the climax. it's the opening page. it's the exposition. a lot of people somehow think that science is all about facts and faith is all about woo woo kind of stuff. but every religious experience starts an experience and then religion is based on what do we do about that experi? it's there will be conflict. there wouldn't be a story without there will be confirm that in trial. you try to understand god. there will be a tough that comes along. you don't want to sleep through

the climax of your story. you're paying attention and watch out for the of that choice. can't skip ahead to the last chapter to find what it's going to be. you know the consequences in my case was taking vows back when my my beard was still red. gray. and then you discover that your story is just one part. the first volume of a good, long, a shared universe. if you will that the wild cards is a classic example, a shared universe. lots of different authors who have decided to tell stories in same universe. make it consequential. then a miracle occurs is lousy. religion as much as it is lousy. science and lousy storytelling. that's not it's not that there aren't miracles, but that that's not how miracles happen. they don't happen out of the for no good reason, unexpected

things happen in your life but with a real miracle. there actually is an internal logic to what's going on what's going on between you and god. sometimes you have to accept that is a logic. even if i can't see it right. because you also have to expect that not everything that seems actually is an act of god. maybe it's coincidence. maybe it's just a random junk. possibly the most original breakthrough in saint ignatius is spiritual exercises, is the guy who founded the jesuit order that i'm part, is what he calls the discernment of rather than, you know, trying reproduce everything he does. i just want to point out that what he did was to come up with a way getting a judgment on things that have happened to you and go, is this really a call from god or is this random junk? is this something i should be

listening? or is this just that i had a bad pizza night? it's not always obvious, but there are ways that you can test these things because. these things from god have an internal logic just as science has an internal logic. if there's no internal logic, it's bad storytelling. if it's bad storytelling, it's bad. number three research. all your characters. most of us are not called to be missionary is to some far off land. the path god is through your neighbors. the people you already know, your opportunity be a saint is going to happen right in the corridors of wherever you are. that incidentally, the amelia earhart library. see if you already have one. god doesn't suddenly appear, out of nowhere he's been on all along with a little practice, you begin to recognize how your stardom if by his weird sense of

humor you know nothing else who but god with a sense of humor would give us a planet nebula that also has a funny face with the clown's nose and recognize and use the richness that already exists in your own tradition. what if every decent religion tradition has got whole set of techniques for learning to recognize god, use them. don't waste your time. reinvent the wheel. that's good. and if it's good storytelling chances, it's good religion. the greatest that any of us gets to make is the story of our own lives. we start with the setting that we've been given the situation into. we were born the talents and the limitations that we were born with. and then you've got a chance to form shape that into something new, something done before our. lives are our own science fiction novels. why do i call them scientific

fun? they take place in the future future. now there's only so much we can do to write them ourselves. sometimes characters just won't behave the way want them to, but it wouldn't real if they only jumped. when you pulled their strings. good storytelling because at the of the day you've got to remember something true in storytelling, religion and science is that there is a fundamental difference between story and, reality and you always have to keep sight of this. never lose sight of it. reality is. what happened? storytelling is how we tell it, how we sense of it. one of my favorite fantasy books, a few years ago with joe walton's among, others that won a whole bunch of awards including best science fiction novel of the year, the nebula, the hugo. if there is a flaw in the book, it's that there are just a few

too many outlandish about the main character. you're crazy family. her tragic background. that awful boarding school she goes to. except turns out. i know joe walton. that's her in the picture, along with another friend of ours, had a palmer and a friend of ours, voltaire. we were all together at the museum in paris paris. a lot of that book is ordered biographical. the parts of her book that are the hardest to swallow are actually the parts that are based on her own life. which is often a problem because when you're trying to a story you have to reality is always richer than what you can tell in the story, which is part of the art of storytelling part the art of science to filter out all those other interesting things to talk about. the one interesting thing that i want to talk about now and

actually an important part of a religion to be able to say of all the millions things going on at this moment, at this time, let me think about this particular. so if you want to get a sense of what i'm doing maybe you can try writing stories yourself, learning by teaching teaches you how stories are learning by doing that teaches you how stories work. fanfiction is really popular for this. it's been fascinating. during covid, i wasn't spending a lot of time reading fanfiction and if nothing else it shows you what the writers most of them are young, what they yearn for the most, what they're most afraid of, what they're most hopeful for. a lot of them want to want to be fabulously rich. a lot of them want to have a magical way of knowing who they're spending the rest of their life with and not make a mistake that way. this site is called archive of our own. it actually won the hugo prize one year. it's not just fiction with training wheels.

it's a slice of folk culture. it's our modern equivalent folk music. it's taking established themes, settings adapting them to the circumstances. the author. i think this is what, you know, scholars will be studying years from now. and when you write, you can not only get the experience to judge how works. you can also learn more and more to start when the author is not being honest with you honest not the same thing is getting all the facts right. there is a difference between a book full of facts and a book that tells truth. that's what poor eustis did understand in the narnia books or me when i was only reading books of facts. they say that chesterton's biography of aquinas or francis of assisi do a great job conveying who those saints were, even though they're full of the kind of mistakes that happen when you're writing them off the

top of your head and you don't have the internet or a library to rely on your lived maybe can't let you judge accuracy of the facts in a story, but it can tell whether what the writer is writing has the ring of truth. of the differences between story in real life. what you learn when you try to start writing it is that writing a good following these rules being careful not to introduce new characters of gods popping of the machinery. it's artifice. it's not real, real life messier on that. that blog site that i talked about making light. one of the commentaries from showrunner says, one of our about one of our favorite science fiction writers. one of the most important in a young science fan's journey to maturity is realizing that robert ability to sound as if he knew what he was about was a whole lot greater than ability to actually know what he was talking about. and that's true in science,

reality is not the controlled environment we create in our labs. it's more like one of those, you know, afterschool that are based on events. and yet there is value in taking the data out of a library out of a laboratory. we've controlled it by taking a story and isolating the elements that we want to study. one of the reasons i trust the gospels that they tell me things that actually happened is that the way to and too inconsistent compared to a well-polished bit of fiction. you know, i think the theologians totally in was trying to say that when he said you know to certain because it's impossible for what he's trying to say is that no one would have made up what happens in the gospel. no one would have made up what happened to jesus. what to the apostles. not if they were trying to make a believable story as saw in the john walton example.

the truth can sometimes, you know, the reality can sometimes be so complicated that it's hard to film. and, you know, i've got this whole literature of fantasy and science fiction stories to tell how our storytellers do make things up, universes in fantasy books are generally a whole lot more self-consistent than and the philosophy thing these science fiction books are usually a lot less profound than. now, doesn't that just contradict? i was saying about bad storytelling being, bad religion, it depends. it depends on your instinct of what i mean by bad. the gospels endured as marvelous stories for 2000 years, longer. i suspect most of those fantasy novels will endure. so obviously the gospels are doing something right. i would i would maybe there are examples of good storytelling that these impossible things are

the kind of novelty makes you say, wow, i see that coming. but of course, that's exactly right. so how can i judge of chesterton or the gospels or anything else really it. right. it's a gut feeling. sometimes you can justify it after the facts with a logical argument, but as with most logic, the gut instinct, the instinct comes first. every student of physics has heard that phrase. this is obviously, intuitively to the casual observer we fire depend on, intuition and faith just as believers depend on experience and facts. most descriptions of science don't give enough credit to those feelings. we are not divided into quirks and sparks, but for that neither were kirk nor spock. if follow the way the stories are told, one was actually very

clever and the other actually was a mass of emotions. even if you tried to suppress it. that is what made them good stories. spending time with stories helps you exercise and develop your intuition, your sense of. yeah, that's right. no, that's the trick. and i've seen that trick before and i'm not going to be fooled by it this time. in addition, it is in our emotions that find not only how we do it, where we get the instincts to know what, you know, experiment is the right experiment to do next. but also that question, i promise a few back. why do we this stuff? why do we do science? why do i get passionate about science fiction books? even ones that i can see aren't great literature. but boy, after i finished one in the series, i have to pick the next one. why? i keep showing up in the lab day after day, trying to get one

more data point. why do i stay outside at night, night after night, looking through a telescope? why do i put up with tedious literature and mediocre requires, you know, what am i really looking for for? chris green has been traveling with me and i went to mass on a parish church i'd never been to before. and he says, what do you expect? and i said, well, what i usually get, you know, i expect the music will be bad. the eucharist will good and the homily will be some place between. in my work as, a planetary scientist at the vatican. i have to put up a large, clumsy top, badly run over central bureaucracy that can be utterly insensitive to what's actually happening far away from headquarters. why do i put up with it? i'm talking about now. so you realize.

but i don't know what you thought. i was talking. i mean, you can -- moan about nassau forever, which a lot of planetary scientists do, but at end of the day, only were able to get us to the moon. but then why did we want to get to the moon? there's this philosophy of school of thought that says human beings do things for pleasure, but it's got to be more subtle than that. i we do things for the hope or the expectation that we'll get some of joy out of it. you do have. to do the work of opening the book and reading opening pages before you can enjoy what the book is and those expectations will never be met. none of them last forever. that's why we keep reading books. but sometimes those expectations oceans let us seahorses when there's actually nothing more than chance. coincidence of clouds. sometimes it brings us to create a beauty that feels familiar.

when there is nothing familiar about. the image cynic often it right. 1700 years ago when he wrote you have made us for yourself, the lord in our hearts are restless until they rest in you all of our desires are ultimate a desire for what would identify as god. so it would call runner, by the way. but that's another story. we create stories in order to imitate a creator is the author of everything we read each other creations to imitate the god who probably watching what we're doing with our lives and going, oh, that's cool. no, no, don't do that. i get burned. look, i'll never read that book. we study god's creation with science because we get an exquisite joy in just being close up, feeling breath of the creator who made the universe

following with delight the, clever story that has woven into how it was created. and i think that's the final point. i want to make this unity between story and science and religion. they're all enjoyed by the same being, who ultimately lee is longing to rest some way in the arms of the creator. that's why this world matters. like a good book that is truth to be found here. but like a book at the end of the day, it's only a thin tissue of words pointing to something, hinting at something that can't be captured, but only suggested a book profound as it might be, is not the reality itself. scientific paper true as may be, is not the same thing as the universe it's trying to describe. our religion can lead us to our god if it's doing its job right. but religion isn't the same thing as god.

you shouldn't be worshiped in your religion. but meanwhile, what we do have at hand is the product of our own creativity, the product, our own god given talent. so you see that that's not the earth. it's a photograph of the earth made and processed by human beings. i'm not the first guy to come up with that. it contains and expresses knowledge. that's why we call it science. but it's also something invented for ourselves, which is why he can call it fiction. looking for stories in case, you know, the narnia books that i got in a writing class, it changed my life. it inspired me to go to mit, get an education in science, get a career in science, showed me that being a scientist could be a great adventure. it showed me the romance of being a christian, good and evil portrayed in an honest fantasy that reflects the good and evil that we in our own life choosing

good fighting evil is exactly the struggle that makes our characters into heroes. and meanwhile seeing worlds that might be teaches us to be more of the worlds that are science fiction led me to science. fantasy led me to truth. and from their religion in. both i've discovered things that i kind of already knew but would never have seen without. and all three, i'm reminded of how wonderful it is to. keep turning the pages. thank you very much. so we have time for questions. if you want questions or comments, there's microphones because. this is being recorded. we won't know what you say until you're standing in front of the

microphone. so if you have anything a question you want to ask, feel to find a microphone. if not, i'll speak on my own for the next 20 minutes. and by you to choose. so you've got a question coming to the microphone. thank very much. so this is somehow ventures and i know if it's related exactly to what you were talking about, except that at the end, i get a glimpse of it and i'm subscribed to your email. and so i get a gist of everything. this combo of faith and science is done now and late. you know, i was always enamored by astronomy, but only it was later that i understood or i learned about this major component of the universe. as we understand it now, being named with the, you know, yeah, whatever name we can come with, which is the dark matter and the dark energy as a very large

component. and all of a sudden now comes back to the faith and my brain because i always said, how can we say father who art in heaven? and then, you know, how can you contained in that creation or what not? and now all of a sudden we're being subject or we're being exposed to something that is otherwise not understood by us very well and by science we're seeking explanation. you know, it's a tremendous force and i did want to take the opportunity that's why i rushed and even came late. but to ask you about that connection and whether it's true, we learn about these dark matter in the sense that they of the outer arms of the galaxies going faster than otherwise be under newtonian physics or it's a great example of we believe in things we see because we see the effects they have on the things we can see and we call them dark energy and dark because we're in

the dark about them. you know, 30 years ago, we weren't even sure that they existed at. also shows us what science is really all about too often people have this idea that science is the way we learned it in school, getting the answers right in the back of the book and that's all sciences then boy that would be boring. but those are just finger exercises that's not playing music. likewise, we think that religion is following a bunch of rules or quoting a bunch of verses. it's the same, you know, it's it's the finger exercises. but both of them are adventures of a human being and ultimately an adventure of love. and the person you is not somebody you say got them figured out. i got their number. you know, i don't need to spend any more time with them. that's not somebody you love a god you love is one you admit you don't understand.

a universe you love is a universe that you admit. you totally have all the facts the more you learn, the more you discover there is to be learned. and that's where the fun comes in and that's why there is a story to be told even if you've read every agatha christie novel and you know, she's got five plots and five characters, which comes out to 25 possible stories, it doesn't matter because you don't know which one you're going to get in. you don't know how she's going to do it this time. i mean, the genius behind the colombo story, you knew who did it from the beginning of the show. and the question was, how were they going to find out? how is he going? how can i spend time with these people who i love, spend time with ultimately science, spending time with the universe because i love it. i work on meteorites because i have a tremendous curiosity of how these meteorites are put together. that's why it's cool. cool question.

but i work with them because they're pieces of outer space that i get to hold in my hands. what could be more thrilling than that and it's a way of spending with them. when i was a kid, i remember i ten years old and was a rainy sunday afternoon. the couldn't go to the beach, couldn't go anywhere and my mom pulls out a deck of cards and we're playing rummy and i had one of those momentary insights that every ten year old kid might have for a second. she's a grown up. i'm ten years old. she could beat anytime she wants to. why is she playing cards? me. she's doing that because she loves me. and it's her way of saying, i want to spend time with you. so the fact that we keep discovering new things like dark energy and dark matter doesn't that. oh, now we've got it solved. now we've got it out. no, it's a fulfillment of the promise that there is always new and more wonderful things to be

learned. thank you. yeah. you got to talk in the microphone or else. we don't know that you were here. ever since i was in high school. before that, actually. but i became aware of science particularly astronomers, astro physicians and physics physicists have been looking for that they call the grand unified right. what if there isn't one? what i mean does upset your faith in science or is it, in fact, to know that would be to know the mind of god? well, the grand unified theory was first pushed by a guy named gutt, whose name is spelled got t just by his grand unified. so i'm always suspicious about that. i am not fascinated to find

grand unified theory. i'd love to see how things are unified, but if it's a fruitful theory. it will expose things that. i didn't know. i didn't know an end to everything in physics would be the absolute worst kind of fate, because it would mean there was nothing else to know and that the universe was horribly. and i don't believe in that kind of universe. i don't believe in a universe where i can't go back my favorite painting or my favorite book and not read new things when i read it the second time. or look at it the second time. so the people who, you know, are looking for a grand unified theory in some way. they're an older generation of physics. i don't find physicists talking about that so much anymore because it comes out of sort the tail end of 19th century science has got it all solved. what used to be called whig ism and the more science you learn,

the more you realize it doesn't have it all solved. science isn't a religion substitute any more than religion is a science substitute, though doing different are doing different things and you let each of them to think they do best because both of them allow humanss to come clor to whatever that is we call truth and if it sounds profound, i am stealing it from pope john paul ii. [laughter] the rise to truth is faith and reason. >> does the vatican observatory

methodically and together talking about finding out the

conversation to sit in, contribute? you know five signs on your own. i think the end of the day the people who can be faith filled without being a member of the church remindd me of those e-mails full of capital letters how they discovered einstein was wrong and that got truth and help them get their book published, that's how it works, we are a community of people and how do we communicate?t telling our stories so goes back toti storytelling. >> when did you teach in kenya? ... n the peace corps

or something equivalent. toughest you'll ever love and an absolute life changing experience to. be pulled out of the familiar just as a science fiction pulls you out of the familiar universe then you look back and see with all the universe, then you will see where all the things that you know tthings that are different from a third world country and be a quantity the little world where want b cell overseas as long as israel's to all the divisions we are getting today the housing booms are ingated communities and in prisons ?

by living overseas you also look and see all the things i wish now i see has specialand unique . class my question is under appreciated we talk about it for a coupleof weeks , modification was in your estimation are insights in the fields of science that are being talked about that would make this incredible inspiring story so why are we talking about this class i used to be a journalist so i understand the temptation to

look for the story. the trouble is there's a 50 percent chance of being wrong or worse yet we don't know which the present yes yes which makes it exciting but it also is a substitute what science really is. if you think about science as a cathedral, it spells one brick at a time and watching senate tried to make for exciting stories ofso i go back to the. instead of talking about facts, you talk about people who have dedicated themselves to the following butterflies and seeing how that has changed in 50 years. or finding people who have been tracing asteroids their orbits on the days where nobody did to the days where suddenlydoes is popular . you tell the stories about the people and you find people who are really.

not the oddballs. not doctor brown in back to thefuture . i love the future but being able to find the story these people is some of the higood storytelling. we've been doing this at the vatican observatory is measuring the density of meteorites. what's their volume, plus steroids and you think it would be easy to nobody had to here's to put together a database nobody can years of funding . then i came along and did it better than the younger guy has now been brought on by nasa to measure the samples being brought to the asteroid

. measuring things today everybody realizes are important 30 years ago nobody ever thought about. and it was a long tedious process for us doing it was in one of. it meant traveling around the world with our little machines and having little adventures dayin and day out . >> you. >> he's got something down so this is going to be dangerous . >> what are scientific discoveries that have reinforced your faith ? >> that's a fabulous question but it actually works the otherway around . what are the things i have learned about god which gives me faith in beinga scientist ?

when i was in the peace corps didn't hear why i in the peace corps. i was a postdoc which meant i couldn't get a job and i was lying in bed wondering why am i worried about the movements of the moons of jupiter starting so i went to africa and found out he wanted to know the moons of jupiter to because they are cool. you go people worrying interest in the universe as it's going to fill my stomach because it feeds my soul. maybe we'll live by bread alone . when i became just what i discovered more and more why having a face in the genesis gives me the courage to do the science. wthink about three things we learn about god in genesis, genesis is a book about god, it's a bottle in creation story which was absolutely 100 years after genesis was on they have to say about god

's importance. the universe is delivered in a but just to say israel. it is not just an illusion. the universe is as logical as day follows night which is to say there is one god who is not part of the universe but already there before the universe was made, supernatural . atif there are ghosts, they are part of our nature. supernatural means outside of space, outside of time. only such a god and give meaning to the universe, if value to the universe and back sets things up following rules which is to say there is no god of thunder know a lot of lightning explained like jesus throwing lightning i better come up with another explanation, mathematical

equations. but if the universe is made to liberty by a god that says this is good and i've had a hebrew scholar telling me another translation is this works. here junior, higher phrase is there? works s. then that means studying the universe is a worthwhile use of your time . that's why you study the moons of jupiter even though there are people starving world because building of your soul gives us the courage to attack the problems of hunger and other things in the long run. but that idea that the universe is good, the idea of the universe is not in the nature of god causing things happen, the idea of the universe is real is not in every religion you have to believe those things if you are studying being a scientist and only i learned

those things about god do i get more reinforced my science is worth doing so god gives me the courage and faith to be a scientist. probably have time for me one more question if you can, on i guess there's two more people . >>. experiences as a scientist affect your life how you frame? >> easy one. everybody prays they everybody prays that at m different times in . probably the finals on my prayer is going for walks in the gardens where our headquarters is located in the egardens. what a great place universe,

when things are feeling you go out and look at the trees and the size . you go to university such a .bad place. maybe there's somethingout there that is needed courage to go on . you ladies and the astronauts prayer. this was the prayer on shepherd said on the first 15 minute jobs in space when he was lying in capital and the use of this out loud not realizing the microphone was on the said here god please note that therole of . to which the people in houston go geask alice allen and that's a common prayer. sometimes god just laughed at me. by making things happen way beyond a thing i expected, divine coincidence just letting me know at the moment i needed.

and that's outside saying just barnes,. now that is a sense of what it's like. it's a conversation with a friend honestly at the end of theday is what it comes down to . >> within the context of stories and religion a lot of precedent for revisiting stories or revisiting religious texts, fruitful interesting to engage in osimilar practice with regards to either revisiting older things happen this long ago or trying to see sent unthinking work on. >> absolutely. one of the most valuable things we have in our observatory is the story of about 8000 glass plates.

where people will the sky or one reason or another going back to eating. now when something shows up and start is shown to be unusual and very legitimate electrical say you have evidence of that? there was some of you and following thing áá in other spacecraft in the leader in the way that easy explanation first was now the oldest hestart is interesting to see it for the three years of the spacecraft idwas, but it 75 years. electrical and you can see that not only are there short-term directions also long-term variation which rules out one set of the suggests a set of theories . reading old scientific papers

you get to have gray hair like me every journey comes a new story because a lot of the people in history books are the peoplewe knew when we were kids . it's not only eye-opening but just on. i accidents one of those divine incidences i happen to fall off the shelf in 1865 on of the. transactions . while i do that? i to see what kind of things are people talking about in 1865 james maxwell's paper. now, those of you are not scientists of this paper we got the idea of electricity and man is can be expressed as fields. the fluctuation of the one lusupports the fluctuation of the other interest things from just fields into waves

in a field and you say what? atit's almost need hurts the right, i sent waves that can be picked up by and have, all i got. marconi said these are going out in every radius . house of maxwell's equations we have the understanding of where his wife and mussolini does, how it can carry information in the spectrum of the items you have encounter out of this we have every bit of electronics that is in the electronic checks that make everything work. house of maxwell's equations came quantum theory and relativity. all these instead a in a set of papers, this particular paper in 19 five is on to the college he knew this is all quantity. he is the speed of light.

and how much he didn't know. what are the assumptions everything goes although life is carried by something called the ether is either as a finite compressibility? there is no either things we finally learned is there is no either. is a relaxation assuming something about the substance that turns out doesn't exist. while the things you learn makes science so amazing that science keeps getting it wrong and yet one some on this route over and over in. which is áalso by means you shouldn't be afraid of being wrong. because in the process of being wrong you learn new things. you didn't realize you didn't know before. in the process of getting you

created since you begin to learn that god wants you and there's nothing you have done makes it stop loving youwhich is kind of creepy . amazing. there's an awful lot to the lord and revisiting. i love those people read release favorite books. there never the same. it is never the same. read lord of the rings or five times sthe feels like a new book every time. that's why we have libraries, we have books we have to live monarchy the library celebrating the place where you can find the things that help me is sense and meaning and structure /with the universe. thanks a lot for your loss