208
regulations have a paralysing effect on everything. ‘That many suffer the same
thing is but a fool’s consolation’, as the Spanish saying goes.
In spite of having dedicated an entire chapter to these matters, I have not
described anything like the totality of the efforts that the IAC has expended
in infusing science into general knowledge through astronomy. My reason for
writing this chapter is my firm belief in the importance that these tasks should
assume in research centres today. Not so long ago, such chores were viewed as
a waste of time, a distraction from the duty of doing science, a mere squandering of resources.
I remember when the University of Padua, where Galileo was teaching for
a long time, organized a series of events in that scientist’s honour during 1992
on the 350th anniversary of his death. Among these events was a very special
conference on the great man to which I had the luck to be invited. In the
course of the day, a select group of scientists, many Nobel laureates among
them, initiated the sessions by reviewing the many facets of the sage. That
night, a renaissance dinner, based on Galileo’s own recipes, was served to the
accompaniment of music of the period. It was quite a do.
I was particularly impressed with the talk given by Professor Carlo Rubbio,
the Director General of CERN, on Galileo as a popularizer. He said, in effect,
that the problem that Galileo had with the Church, which in the Middle Ages
represented established wisdom, was a consequence of the great scientific leap
of the renaissance. It was not so much a religious as a knowledge-based confrontation, a head-on clash between two different ways of seeing the world, a
conflict of paradigms.
He used data to contrast the great gulf that has now opened between scientific knowledge, which is increasing exponentially, and pseudoscientific
beliefs, which are becoming increasingly popular. This rift, he maintained, is
greater today than it was in the renaissance. If Galileo had so many problems
just for insisting that the heavens were not perfect, and that the earth orbited
the sun, what is going to happen to us scientists today when we even have the
temerity to meddle with people’s genes? Smiling and gesticulating as only
Italians can, Carlo wryly declared, ‘They’ll burn us! They’ll burn us!’
All this was a preamble to an insistence that researchers and their places of
work must involve themselves in the popularization of science. Galileo,
Rubbio reminded his audience, wrote in Tuscan rather than Latin so that he
could be understood. He insisted that we all had both a moral and a pragmatic duty to devote time and resources to explaining in a direct manner the
science that we are producing, and that the immense resources needed for Big
Science had to be justified before the citizens, who foot the bill.
F. Sánchez
regulations have a paralysing effect on everything. ‘That many suffer the same
thing is but a fool’s consolation’, as the Spanish saying goes.
In spite of having dedicated an entire chapter to these matters, I have not
described anything like the totality of the efforts that the IAC has expended
in infusing science into general knowledge through astronomy. My reason for
writing this chapter is my firm belief in the importance that these tasks should
assume in research centres today. Not so long ago, such chores were viewed as
a waste of time, a distraction from the duty of doing science, a mere squandering of resources.
I remember when the University of Padua, where Galileo was teaching for
a long time, organized a series of events in that scientist’s honour during 1992
on the 350th anniversary of his death. Among these events was a very special
conference on the great man to which I had the luck to be invited. In the
course of the day, a select group of scientists, many Nobel laureates among
them, initiated the sessions by reviewing the many facets of the sage. That
night, a renaissance dinner, based on Galileo’s own recipes, was served to the
accompaniment of music of the period. It was quite a do.
I was particularly impressed with the talk given by Professor Carlo Rubbio,
the Director General of CERN, on Galileo as a popularizer. He said, in effect,
that the problem that Galileo had with the Church, which in the Middle Ages
represented established wisdom, was a consequence of the great scientific leap
of the renaissance. It was not so much a religious as a knowledge-based confrontation, a head-on clash between two different ways of seeing the world, a
conflict of paradigms.
He used data to contrast the great gulf that has now opened between scientific knowledge, which is increasing exponentially, and pseudoscientific
beliefs, which are becoming increasingly popular. This rift, he maintained, is
greater today than it was in the renaissance. If Galileo had so many problems
just for insisting that the heavens were not perfect, and that the earth orbited
the sun, what is going to happen to us scientists today when we even have the
temerity to meddle with people’s genes? Smiling and gesticulating as only
Italians can, Carlo wryly declared, ‘They’ll burn us! They’ll burn us!’
All this was a preamble to an insistence that researchers and their places of
work must involve themselves in the popularization of science. Galileo,
Rubbio reminded his audience, wrote in Tuscan rather than Latin so that he
could be understood. He insisted that we all had both a moral and a pragmatic duty to devote time and resources to explaining in a direct manner the
science that we are producing, and that the immense resources needed for Big
Science had to be justified before the citizens, who foot the bill.
F. Sánchez