TABLET THE www.thetablet.co.uk


1 King Street Cloisters, Clifton Walk, London W6 0GY Tel: +44 (0)20 8748 8484 Fax: +44 (0)20 8748 1550


EDITORIAL Email: thetablet@thetablet.co.uk Editor:Catherine Pepinster Editorial Consultant:Clifford Longley Deputy Editor: Elena Curti Assistant Editor and Foreign News Editor: James Roberts Production Editor:David Harding Chief Sub-editor: Polly Chiapetta Home News Editor: Christopher Lamb News Reporter: Sam Adams Rome Correspondent: Robert Mickens Arts Editor: Brendan McCarthy Literary Editor: Sue Gaisford Religious Books Editor: Alban McCoy Parish Practice: Diana Klein Online Editor: Abigail Frymann


COMMERCIAL, MARKETING & ADVERTISING Publisher: Ignatius Kusiak Marketing Manager: Ian Farrar Email: ifarrar@thetablet.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)20 8222 7358 ■Display advertising and inserts Email: agata.zukowska@redactive.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)20 7880 7668 ■Classified: +44 (0)20 7880 6217


SUBSCRIPTIONS Tel: +44 (0)1795 414855 Fax: +44 (0)1795 414555 Email: thetablet@servicehelpline.co.uk


DIRECTORS John Adshead CBE, Chairman; Robin Baird-Smith, Tina Beattie, Mike Craven, Angela Cunningham, Julian Filochowski CMG, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, Ignatius Kusiak, Keith Leslie, Susan Penswick, Catherine Pepinster, Paul Vallely CMG.


CALENDAR Sunday 26 June: Corpus Christi Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord (Year A) Monday 27 June: St John Southworth, Priest and Martyr Tuesday 28 June: St Irenaeus, Bishop and Martyr Wednesday 29 June: Sts Peter and Paul, Apostles Thursday 30 June: Feria or Protomartyrs of the Holy Roman Church Friday 1 July: Most Sacred Heart of Jesus Saturday 2 July: Immaculate Heart of Mary Sunday 3 July: Fourteenth Sunday of the Year


■For the Extraordinary Form calendar go to www.latin-mass-society.org/ordo.htm


Published weekly except Christmas. Periodicals Postage Paid at Rahway, NJ, and at additional mailing offices. U.S. Postmaster: Send airspeed address corrections to The Tablet, c/o Air Business Limited, 4 The Merlin Centre, Acrewood Way, St Albans, Herts AL4 0JY, UK. Annual subscription rate US$179. © The Tablet Publishing Company Limited 2011 The Tablet is printed by Headley Brothers Ltd, The Invicta Press, Lower Queens Road, Ashford, Kent TN24 8HH, for the proprietors The Tablet Publishing Company Limited, 1 King Street Cloisters, Clifton Walk, London W6 0GY 25 June 2011


Independently audited certified average circulation per issue of THE TABLET for issues distri buted between 1 July and


31 December 2010 is 21,858. Volume 265 No. 8901 ISSN: 0039 8837


ACROSS THE UNIVERSE


Keys to scientific success GUY CONSOLMAGNO


THE TYPICALscientist spends more time in front of a keyboard, writing, than in a lab or a telescope dome. That’s certainly true in my case. This past month has seen me busy with many different sorts of paperwork. One task this month was serving as a ref- eree for one of the journals in my field. When scientists want to publish a new idea or set of data, they write up an article in a quite rigid format, designed not to let the greatest num- ber of people understand it, but rather such that the fewest possible might misunderstand it. They send it to the journal where they think it should be published; its editor then chooses other scientists in the field to referee the article, grading it with lots of red ink. This is all done anonymously, though the referees’ identities can often be deduced from their comments (“You neglected to reference the classic work of Consolmagno from 1977 …”). In the paper I evaluated, I thought the idea was brilliant (that is, it matches my prejudices) and is almost certainly true (it matches …) but the authors, alas, failed to make their case. On one fundamental piece of evidence, they merely asserted it to be true without explain- ing where they got their value; another key data point they cited came from a paper that’s been submitted to another journal, but not yet accepted. If that journal’s referees find a flaw in that work, then this work would fall to the ground. Like a legal case, the chain of evidence must be free of any weak link. Having judged a paper, this month I also


put myself up to be judged. Though my own funding comes directly from the Vatican, I could not do my science without a team of col- laborators who must pay their own salaries, and buy their expensive lab equipment, with money from Nasa. Thus every three years they must outline and justify a budget for what they


(we) hope to do next. So I was busy for a week writing up how we plan to twist and freeze and otherwise torture meteorites to tease out values of their physical properties – how they respond to changes in force and temperature. Our proposal will in turn be judged by a panel of our colleagues. We present our results at annual meetings; for me, this is the Meteoritical Society and the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Union, which is holding a joint meeting this year with its European counterparts in Nantes, France, in October. We’ve barely started the research we hope to report by then. But short abstracts were already due this month, to reserve time at the meeting where we can present our results. Another bit of keyboard work. It’s a special art to write up, in the past tense, things that have not yet quite been accomplished … On a day-to-day basis, the common work


of a scientist is either sorting and filing data, or writing up reports. Clerical work. No sur- prise it has, over the centuries, been done so often by clerics. A skimming of old volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society shows that, until about 100 years ago, science was done mostly by noblemen, medical doctors and reverends. (That was before Nasa grants.)


I mentioned last month how a classical edu- cation is the foundation for many scientists’ education. Being able to communicate, clearly, is essential. If you didn’t write it down, and tell someone about it, it didn’t happen. Thus has my month been occupied by many writ- ing tasks … the last of which will be completed by the end of this sentence.


■Guy Consolmagno SJ is the curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory.


Glimpses of Eden


WITH MY wind-up torch fully charged, I set off on my nightly pest-control round. The recent rain had brought a few more


little black slugs on to the lettuces, and it was tricky to tease them off. Snails, too, were head- ing determinedly for the cabbages; each one had to be lifted clear and hurled into the distance. I was just straightening up from the straw-


berry patch when my torch caught a white glimmer. Was it the beam catching the petals of the waist-high dog daisies, also called moon daisies? No, the glimmer had a life of its own; it was pulsating, moving; floating higher, it shimmered towards me at head height. As though shining with its own inner depth


36 | THE TABLET | 25 June 2011


of light, the other-worldly object flickered about my torch for a while, before being joined by a second, a third, a fourth ghostly wisp. These weird dancing sprites were moths. Shock over, but amazement remaining, and feeling as though I’d just brushed the hidden hem of Titania’s dress from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I rushed inside to the internet. Research soon revealed these twilight dancers to be the aptly named ghost moth. The tech- nical term for their shimmering movement is “lekking”, during which the male displays for the females lying below in the long grass. Some people believe that the folkloric will-o’-the wisp, that treacherous light, which leads lonely travellers astray, has its origin in the twilight play of the ghost moth.


Jonathan Tulloch


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36