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of solids, Maxwell s and Clausius work in the kinetic theory of
gases . . . all developments of Boscovich s theory pure and simple.
Although Kelvin s own views were known to change frequently,
he finally observed in 1905,  My present assumption is
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Boscovichianism pure and simple. In 1958, an International
Bicentenary Symposium was held in Belgrade to commemorate
the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Theory.
The presentations included papers by Niels Bohr and Werner
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Heisenberg.
The life of Father Boscovich reveals to us a man who remained
ever faithful to the Church he loved and the order of priests of
which he was a member, and who also possessed an excitement
about knowledge and learning. One anecdote must suffice: In
1745, this man of science spent his summer in Frascati, where a
splendid summer residence was in the process of being built for
the Jesuits. In the course of carrying out the project, builders
managed to dig up the remains of a villa dating to the second cen-
tury B.C. That was all it took: Father Boscovich was now an
enthusiastic archaeologist, excavating and copying mosaic floors.
He was convinced that the sundial he found was the one men-
tioned by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. He found time
to write two studies: On the Ancient Villa Discovered on the
Ridge of Tusculum and On the ancient sundial and certain other
treasures found among the ruins. His discoveries were reported in
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the Giornale de Letterati the following year.
Father Athanasius Kircher (1602 1680) resembled Father
Boscovich in his enormous range of interests; he has been
compared to Leonardo da Vinci and honored with the title  mas-
ter of a hundred arts. His work in chemistry helped to debunk
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THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE 109
alchemy, which had been seriously entertained even by the likes
of Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, the father of modern chem-
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istry. A scholar writing in 2003 describes Kircher as  a giant
among seventeenth-century scholars, and  one of the last
thinkers who could rightfully claim all knowledge as his
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domain.
Kircher s interests also included a fascination with ancient
Egypt, where he distinguished himself in his scholarship. Thus,
for example, he showed that the Coptic language was actually a
vestige of early Egyptian. He has been called the real founder of
Egyptology, no doubt because his work was carried out before
the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta stone rendered Egyptian hiero-
glyphics comprehensible to scholars. Indeed it was  because of
Kircher s work that scientists knew what to look for when inter-
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preting the Rosetta stone. Thus a modern scholar of ancient
Egypt could conclude,  It is therefore Kircher s incontestable
merit that he was the first to have discovered the phonetic value
of an Egyptian hieroglyph. From a humanistic as well as an intel-
lectual point of view Egyptology may very well be proud of hav-
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ing Kircher as its founder.
The Jesuits contributions to seismology (the study of earth-
quakes) have been so substantial that the field itself has some-
times been called  the Jesuit science. Jesuit involvement in
seismology has been attributed both to the order s consistent
presence in the universities in general and in the scientific com-
munity in particular, as well as to its priests desire to minimize
the devastating effects of earthquakes to whatever extent possi-
ble as a service to their fellow men.
In 1908, Father Frederick Louis Odenbach came up with the
idea for what eventually became the Jesuit Seismological Service
when he noted that the far-flung system of Jesuit colleges and uni-
versities throughout America held out the possibility of creating a
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110 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
network of seismographic stations. Having received the blessing of
the presidents of Jesuit institutions of higher learning as well as
that of American Jesuit provincials, Father Odenbach put his idea
into practice the following year with the purchase of fifteen seis-
mographs, each distributed to a Jesuit institution. Each of these
seismographic stations would collect its data and send its findings
to the central station in Cleveland. From there the data would be
passed along to the International Seismological Center in Stras-
bourg. Thus was born the Jesuit Seismoloigcal Service, which has
been described as  the first seismological network established of
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continental scale with uniform instrumentation.
The best-known Jesuit seismologist, however, and indeed one
of the most honored practitioners of the science of all time, was
Father J. B. Macelwane. In 1925, Father Macelwane reorganized
and reinvigorated the Jesuit Seismological Service (which was
now known as the Jesuit Seismological Association), locating its
central station this time at St. Louis University. A brilliant
researcher, Father Macelwane published Introduction to Theo-
retical Seismology, the first textbook on seismology in America,
in 1936. He served as president of the Seismological Society of
America and of the American Geophysical Union. In 1962, the
latter organization established a medal in his honor, still
awarded to this day, to recognize the work of exceptional young
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geophysicists.
In the field of astronomy, the public is left with the impression
that churchmen, to the extent that they pursued the science at
all, did so only in order to confirm their preconceived ideas rather
than to follow the evidence wherever it led them. We have
already seen how untrue that suggestion is, but a bit more addi-
tional evidence shall round out our discussion.
Johannes Kepler (1571 1630), the great astronomer whose
laws of planetary motion constituted such an important scientific
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THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE 111
advance, carried on extensive correspondence with Jesuit
astronomers over the course of his career. When at one point in
his life Kepler found himself in financial difficulties as well as sci- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]