[meteorite-list] Nininger & The Vatican

[michael cottingham]

Who's Nininger?


On Nov 15, 2009, at 3:52 PM, Meteorites USA wrote:

> An eye on the sky, one on the ground
> By Christopher Cokinos
> Posted: 11/15/2009 01:00:00 AM MST
> http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_13776988
>
> Meteorite expert Harvey Nininger. (Courtesy of the American  
> Meteorite Laboratory Photo Collection, Collections Research for  
> Museums, Denver )
>
> The International Year of Astronomy is drawing to a close, and it's  
> been marked by some notable passages. We've celebrated the 400th  
> anniversary of Galileo's first view through a telescope, and we've  
> looked back 40 years to the first Apollo moon landing.
>
> This month, another anniversary has taken place, but one quite  
> obscure except to some dealers, collectors and researchers of  
> meteorites. Eighty-six years ago, on Nov. 9, 1923, a then-unknown,  
> middle-aged science professor named Harvey Nininger was walking home  
> from work in McPherson, Kan. Suddenly, he saw a huge meteor so vivid  
> that eyewitnesses would remember the event for years to come.
>
> The fireball would also change the course of Harvey's life and the  
> course of science. Nininger anticipated an insight about life and  
> death on our planet decades before it became widely accepted by  
> researchers and then became the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.
>
> When the meteor vanished from his view on that chilly evening,  
> Nininger marked the sidewalk where he stood. He knew that if he  
> received enough reports from eyewitnesses, he could triangulate  
> their accounts and have a rough sense of where meteorites might have  
> fallen. (Meteors are the passage of burning objects from space into  
> our atmosphere; meteorites are the heavy, usually dark rocks that  
> sometimes fall from them to Earth.)
>
> Nininger's idea was a radical one. No one had attempted to search  
> for meteorites where none had been seen to fall, and a leading  
> geologist once told Nininger that if he spent the rest of his life  
> looking for meteorites he might find one. The geologist was wrong.
>
> Though Nininger didn't find any space rocks from that Nov. 9  
> fireball, in the years ahead he'd find hundreds from other falls.  
> Nininger believed that more meteorites could be discovered from  
> unwitnessed or forgotten falls by simply scouring the countryside.  
> He was proven right on that count as well.
>
> After quitting his $3,000-a-year teaching job at McPherson College  
> (during the Great Depression!), Nininger moved his family to Denver,  
> where in 1930 he became a part-time curator of meteorites at the  
> Colorado Museum of Natural History. The museum paid him just $600 a  
> year, so Nininger had to rely on his obsession and his wits to make  
> a living at buying, selling, finding, displaying, popularizing and  
> researching meteorites. No one had done anything like it before in  
> the study of space rocks, which was then a backwater of geology.
>
> With help from Denver truck magnate Dean Gillespie, Nininger criss- 
> crossed the continent, from Saskatoon to Chihuahua City, discovering  
> newly fallen meteorites and ones that had languished in ditches,  
> corn fields, even attics. He proved that iron meteorites were not  
> the most common ones to fall, but that they were "selected" for  
> discovery because they look so alien and weigh so much. He recovered  
> 1,200 pounds of a rare stony-iron meteorite from a Kansas field.
>
> When most people still thought craters on the moon had been formed  
> by volcanoes, Nininger and a few others begged to differ, suggesting  
> they must have formed by the impacts of meteorites. He was right  
> once more. And 40 years before scientists would link the extinction  
> of the dinosaurs to an asteroid's collision with the planet,  
> Nininger suggested that cosmic impacts could lead to global mass  
> extinctions.
>
> A tireless worker, Nininger did find time during his Denver years to  
> be active with the Boy Scouts and take his children to concerts.  
> They watched the colored lights of the fountain at City Park,  
> recalls Nininger's daughter, Doris Banks. Winter car trips meant  
> that Harvey would warm up iron meteorites at home, then wrap them in  
> blankets to place on the floorboard, thus keeping everyone toasty.
>
> I suppose not many Denverites today remember the name Harvey  
> Nininger, but until World War II he was one of the city's most  
> prominent scientific citizens. He was also known nationally from  
> profiles in publications like The Saturday Evening Post.
>
> Eventually, he moved his family to Arizona, where he opened the  
> world's only museum of meteorites and where his pursuits continued,  
> at times, to get him in hot water. For example, Nininger didn't have  
> a Ph.D., but he when he was awarded an honorary doctorate he began  
> calling himself "Dr. Nininger," at least on his letterhead.
>
> His love of meteorites became a family affair. His son-in-law, Glenn  
> Huss, took over Nininger's "American Meteorite Laboratory" in Denver  
> for many years. Glenn's son, Gary, has become one of the world's  
> best-known researchers of meteorites and the solar system.
>
> Tonight, go outside and watch the sky for a meteor. Look for the  
> Leonid meteor shower when it peaks on Tuesday night and Wednesday  
> morning. And remember that a few rare souls don't just make a wish  
> when they see a meteor. Instead, they work hard to make that wish  
> real. So it was with Harvey Nininger, Denver's original "meteorite  
> man."
>
> Christopher Cokinos is a professor at Utah State University and  
> author of "The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting  
> Stars" (Tarcher/Penguin July 2009).
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
> Vatican's eye on the heavens
> By ERIC BERGER
> HOUSTON CHRONICLE
> Nov. 14, 2009, 9:58PM
> http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6721242.html
>
> Brother Guy Consolmagno is curator of the meteorite collection at  
> Vatican City.
>
> Brother Guy Consolmagno, the curator of meteorites at the Vatican  
> Observatory, will give a free public lecture at 7:30 p.m. Thursday  
> at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, 3600 Bay Area Blvd. in the  
> Clear Lake area. Before coming to Houston, he spoke with science  
> writer Eric Berger about what the pope's astronomers do, about  
> Galileo and about the fate of Pluto.
>
> Q: What does a Vatican astronomer do?
>
> A: There are 15 Jesuits and one diocesan priest involved at the  
> Vatican Observatory, and basically 12 of us are astronomers and the  
> others help out with administration. We do astronomy. When I was  
> hired I was told one thing: Do good science. We each have our own  
> programs, ranging from cosmology and string theory all the way to  
> planetary science and meteor dust. We all do regular science,  
> collaborating with other scientists around the world. Our group  
> comes from four different continents and probably speaks a dozen  
> languages. For my own particular work I do planetary science, so I'm  
> the curator of the meteorite collection, and I do a lot of physical  
> studies of meteorites, their density, porosity, thermal properties.  
> And the goal of doing these measurements is to be able to understand  
> the conditions under which these rocks were formed 4.5 billion years  
> ago in the early solar system, and also to give us an idea about the  
> materials that made the planets.
>
> Q: I take it the church no longer persecutes its astronomers.
>
> A: Certainly the Catholic Church did wrong by Galileo, everybody  
> admits that. The history of what exactly happened is a lot more  
> confusing than the mythology. I don't claim to know the truth more  
> than anyone else. The odd thing is, what happened to Galileo is sort  
> of contrary to the whole tradition of the church supporting science,  
> and even supporting Galileo most of his life. It had to be a rude  
> shock to him because up until about 1630, he was in his late 60s  
> then, he had had nothing but support from the majority of the  
> church. The pope was his friend. Then suddenly he was brought to  
> trial for a book that had been published with church approval. After  
> the trial he was allowed to stay with his friend, the cardinal of  
> Sienna, and eventually go home. Those years during the trial were  
> just a very odd, odd anomaly. The best theory I've heard is that it  
> had to do with the fact that the Thirty Years War was going on, and  
> it was all tied up in local politics. But that doesn't make anywhere  
> near as cute a story as the church being anti-science.
>
> Q: Some 400 years later there's still a lot of tension between  
> science and religion in the United States.
>
> A: I think that comes from scientists who are not really comfortable  
> with religion because they don't know it very well; the religion  
> they know is what they learned when they were 12 years old. And many  
> religious people are not comfortable with science because they don't  
> know science very well. Face it, most people stopped learning  
> science and religion when they were about 12 years old, so they have  
> a very childish understanding of both: Religion is a big book of  
> rules and science is a big book of facts. Fortunately, neither is  
> true.
>
> Q: Why should science and faith co-exist?
>
> A: The fact is, they do. The hardest thing I've had in my job of  
> talking about this is trying to figure out why anyone would think  
> they couldn't. It's a funny thing. I was a scientist for 15 years  
> before I entered the Jesuits, and most of my friends in the science  
> world had no idea about my religious life, any more than I knew  
> theirs, because it's private. But when I became a Jesuit I was  
> surprised at how many of them came up to me and said, “Oh, that's  
> wonderful. Let me tell you about the church I go to.”
>
> Q: Does the pope think Pluto should be a planet?
>
> A: The Catholic Church does not take official positions on matters  
> of science. We learned that lesson from Galileo, thank you.
>
> Q: Well, what do you think? Should Pluto be a planet? (In 2006  
> astronomers declared it no longer should be considered a planet.)
>
> A: I was actually deeply involved in that whole discussion — as was  
> Chris Corbally from our group, who helped write the final definition  
> — because the Vatican Observatory is a member of the International  
> Astronomical Union. In retrospect, although it wasn't the way I  
> voted at the time, now that I've lived with it for three years I  
> think they made the right choice.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
> Enjoy...
>
> Regards,
> Eric Wichman
> Meteorites USA
> ______________________________________________
> http://www.meteoritecentral.com
> Meteorite-list mailing list
> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list