A year on Neptune

It has been one Neptune year – or about 165 Earth years – since astronomers first observed the most distant planet from the sun.

Neptune’s existence was suspected, but not confirmed until September 23, 1846 by German Astronomer Johann Galle.  It wasn’t until a fair few years later that it was named Neptune, after the Roman God of the Sea.

Actually, it was that genius Galileo Galilea that first spotted Neptune more than 200 years earlier, but wrongly assumed it was a star. (If you weren’t dead, you’d be gutted, small mercies I suppose.)

 Galileo has always fascinated me; he was born in Pisa in 1564, one of six children. His dad was a famous musician/composer of his time.  Two of his siblings did not make it past infancy, and he was going to pursue a career in the priesthood, but his father urged him to get a degree instead. Interesting, considering what happened to him.

In his career as a physicist, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, he made improvements to the telescope, discovered the four largest satellites of Jupiter and began the work on the analysis of sunspots. Oh, and discovered Neptune…not bad really.

He jumped into the limelight over his heliocentric views, going against the geocentric grain of Catholic belief that the Earth was the centre of the universe. After 1610 Galileo began publically supporting his views that it was, in fact, the Sun that sat in the centre spot. He met with bitter opposition from clerics and astronomers, and was denounced to the Roman Inquisition, who in turn warned him to change or stay silent about is ideas.

He promised he would, but like any other freethinking, self respecting liberal minded rebel from the history books, went completely back on his word. In 1632 he was tried by the inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, forced to recant and spent the rest of his life under house arrest until he died in Jan 1642.

Ironic that the word Catholic means Universal, and that Galileo is now commonly referred to as the father of Modern Science, not least by the remarkable theoretical physicist Steven Hawkins.

I don’t want to throw stones at the Catholic Church for its idiotic presumption of past. The Vatican have now more than made up for their closed minded (scientific at least) views. In 2008, the Chief of the Vatican’s Observatory (established 1891; another irony) Fr. Jose Gabriel Funes told a reporter that extra-terrestrial life “is possible, even if until now, we have no proof.”  The 48-year old Argentine, still Chief today, went on to say that there was no tension between the Catholic faith and belief in aliens.

"Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures over the earth, so there could be other beings, even intelligent, created by God. This is not in contradiction with our faith, because we cannot establish limits to God's creative freedom."

Suck on that Steven Dawkins!

Because if there is a God – why would it be bothered that you found out just how infinite it was? Perhaps a modest God would like to keep things under wraps a little, but then why would a modest God make commandments?  Truth is I have never understood why Religion has disputed science. Science shows to me that there is infinite intelligence in operation all around me. There is nothing more divine than a strand of DNA, it has God’s fingerprint all over it.

But I suppose the argument really breaks down to how you define God. If you define God as an abstract father figure with homicidal jealous tendencies and mood swings of plague proportions, I suppose it is not a leap of faith to believe such a role model would want you to stay ignorant of truth.

Thankfully there is more than one way to define a deity.

Timothy Leary said the Universe was an intelligence test. He also said: “we are dealing with the best educated generation in history. But they’ve got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.”

Maybe it’s going to take longer than a year on Neptune to change that.