Jesuit 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. Well see about that today. And hes 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 HollywoodRegional 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. Well go and should ring up if were lucky this should ring up if were lucky. There we are. Thank heavens im brother guy consolmagno. As you heard, the director of the vatican observatory thats me. Im 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 its 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, ive 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 its 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, youre 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 ive got 20 different publishers looking for were going to auction off the rights can you write a and cliff goes im not a better writer today than i was yesterday you can go ahead. You write the book. Ill sell it. He had no idea how to write a book which i was bizarre because cliff is one of the most fantastic id ever come across in my life. And i said, cliff, dont give the details tell stories now. I didnt 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 werent going to go into the problems had because what he realized is you dont tell stories you dont do you dont 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 im sorry i didnt 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 isnt 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. Im 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 wellwritten 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 didnt even like fantasy books, wanted books with facts kind of like the eustace character in narnia that boy did. I relate to him. So its not surprising that id 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. Im 18 years old. I discovered for the first time im concentrating on the authors technique more than the content. But i discovered that this had a remarkable effect. Me it wasnt the fact that they were christian. You know, obviously were christian. You can tell that if youre 18 years old, it might be snuck when youre 12 or eight. But i was still a practicing back in those days. So, you know being christian didnt bother me. I wasnt surprised to find myself up in the adventures because thats 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 theyre true, not in the details, but if theyre true to the human spirit, if theyre 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 hadnt seen before. Another thing happened when i was reading the narnia in the midst of the library, i discovered that its a library and i said, this is the Worlds 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. Im 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 havent 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 im looking for when i read a science paper, i want to see something i havent seen before. I want to see Something Interesting enough that i go through the equations and it had better be the truth. Thats what its all about. But then thats what im looking for when im 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 thats 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. Theres got to be an underlying sense of the joy, even if theres a sense of tragedy. Some get something me to make me turn the pages that joy is a sign of gods 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, id 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 youre an atheist, if youre a storyteller or if youre 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 gods 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, thats what would happen. Whether its frodo and gollum when they get to mount doom or any other mystery story where youre bamboozled until you get to the oh of course i should have seen it all along. And of whats a bad story is when they shove characters to do what the author wants them do. And you going, yeah, i dont think so real life isnt like that. It doesnt have to be about people that. You would agree with really is full of people who you love doing things that you wish they hadnt done. If we didnt love them, we wouldnt care. But but it reminds me that, you know when youre young, you hear the church the time saying, dont do that. But when youre older, you realize your church or your parents have been saying, oh, dont do that. Weve been there there. A story that shoves its characters around to fit some preconceived outcome isnt 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 were making in our own lives and. If you find a character you love doing something you wish they had and maybe thatll help you be a little more generous to. Your friends who do things when you really wish they hadnt. Its in storytelling. We get most quickly to that truth. Our philosophy, our ethics, ultimately our religion doesnt 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 posthuman 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 youre pregnant, you just pop it out, put it in a box, come back. Nine months later, youve got a baby and you havent 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 hes got great clarity of. And its important to have these scholarly perspectives. But his book doesnt 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. Theyre 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 theyre fun to read. Now, the thing to remember is that these are space operas. Theyre not philosopher b, they make no pretense to how so . Being high literature by design, theyre page. They follow the adventures of highly unusual heroes doing, you know, crazy things, highly unusual sidekicks. Theyve 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 its 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, lets 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. Its 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 pauls epistles and theres just so many words fly over your head, you dont 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 arent 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, whos taking care of the pigs, never mind. Theres a mother function of making a point, a story that derives from the fact that scripture was written, a time when most people couldnt 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 dont have anymore, which is to communicate ideas in that are in the written word to people who cant read. Nowadays, almost everybody can. Since the invention of the printing press, youre 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 its 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 youre 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. Thats 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, weve 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. Theres exposition, rising action, climax falling action. And while so the story with an exposition of where a