Brother Guy popped a 4.6-billion-year old meteorite into my hand. This was the oldest in the collection and was found in France in 1810. Lots of locals saw it fall from the sky and then had to convince sceptical scientists that it was space rock. It has a handwritten label attached to it telling how it fell to earth in L’Aigle.
On the wall is a photograph of the current Pope looking into a microscope at a section of meteorite. Brother Guy showed him two; one found near his hometown in southern Germany; the other one in the Ukraine in 1866. Brother Guy showed me the second slice. He took it out of its drawer and slid it under a microscope that shone polarized light. ‘It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope,’ I said. Brother Guy turned the slide in circles, and bright colours shifted into new patterns. It was bizarre that so many shapes could appear from something that looked so bland and tiny on the slide. ‘All the meteorites do this under polarized light,’ Brother Guy added, ‘but this is the prettiest of them all.’
Brother Guy made a Christmas card out of an image of the meteorite I was looking at, because he thinks a pattern within it looks like Jesus in a manger. He gave me one of the cards. On the back, it says, ‘The meteorite samples formed in the proto-solar nebula around our sun, 4.56 billion years ago.’
This card is not your average Christmas card, and not one you’d expect to get from the Vatican, at least, not unless you know about Brother Guy and the two Vatican observatories.
[Mars canals] Secchi drew some of the first colour illustrations of Mars and referred to the canali, the Italian word for channels, on the surface of the planet. Some nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century astronomers thought ‘canali’ meant ‘canals’ and used them as evidence that there was life on Mars.
[Three pieces of Mars] The Vatican Observatory owns three pieces of Mars rock, each one from a different part of the planet.
[Brother Guy J. Consolmagno] Brother Guy was assigned the job of astronomer at the Vatican Observatory when he became a Jesuit. He showed me around the Vatican meteorite collection at the Pope’s summer residence.
THE ROYAL SOCIETY IN LONDON began in 1660, when a group of scientists decided it would be valuable to meet once a week and discuss experiments. Today it is one of the oldest scientific academies in the world.
Their archive is split between a salt mine in Cheshire – to access anything down there you have to go in a miner’s lift and put on a hard hat and a basement in its HQ in London.
I headed downstairs into the basement, which is stuffed with a quarter of a million manuscripts made up of the musings, publications and letters written by some of the greatest scientific minds that have ever lived.
Mixed in among the books and writings are 200 objects, including slides of a goat with the bends (used when working out dive tables), a wonderful doodle on blotting paper by top scientists and the then prime minister gathered at a meeting about the Transit of Venus in 1882, tag and a wooden potato masher made by a young Ernest Rutherford for ten his grandma. I looked a bit confused. ‘Rutherford,’ said Keith Moore, curator of the Royal Society’s library and archives, ‘split the atom.’ Rutherford is buried in Westminster Abbey, near Sir Isaac Newton.
Pretty much everyone has heard the story about how Newton first described gravity. He was sitting underneath an apple tree when an apple fell from the tree and bounced off his head. Newton wondered why. His answer? A thing he called gravity. Anyone who has looked deeper into the tale comes up against people saying it wasn’t true.
But Newton knew the value of a good anecdote and told it himself. In the Royal Society library there is a first-hand account of him describing the event to William Stukeley, author of Memoirs of Newton’s Life (1752):
After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea [sic], under the shade of some apple trees; only he, and myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre?
So the apple tree really did inspire Newton, even if the apple didn’t fall on his head. The account is online on the Royal Society’s website if you want to see it.
Just as Newton had never before considered why it was that apples fall to the ground, even though I had heard the story many times before I’d never wondered which actual apple tree had inspired him. That was, until I saw several pieces of it behind the scenes at the Royal Society.
Newton’s fabled apple tree once stood in the garden of his childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. In 1800, the inspirational tree blew over. Luckily, it re-rooted itself, and a new tree, an offshoot from the original, is still flourishing there today.
The owner of Woolsthorpe Manor saved some pieces of Newton’s original apple tree after it blew over. Some of them are in the Royal Society archives. On a shelf down in the cool basement are two fragments, as well as two rulers and a prism made from the wood. One of the fragments is in a little pink plastic bag, because it has just been on an adventure, up into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2010. It will remain in the pink bag, because the bag is now part of its history.
The apple wood was taken up into orbit so that it could experience zero gravity. The plan was also to drop a real apple on the space station and film whether it was subject to gravity or not. They weren’t able to do the test because an astronaut who didn’t know what they were up to – she will remain nameless – saw the apple lying around and ate it. They could hardly pop out to the shops, so they had to make do with a pear. You can watch a film of it floating.
Keith told me the pear is flying, not because it wasn’t subject to gravity, but because the space station is falling, and the pear with it, in orbit. ‘Just look at the astronauts’ hair,’ he said. It floats above their heads.
Also in the archives is a lock of Newton’s hair – perhaps with high concentrations of mercury in it, as a result of his alchemical experiments – and his death mask. ‘This is the closest you’ll get to Isaac Newton,’ said Keith.
We looked at a drawing of Newton’s apple tree, sketched by Thomas Howison in the 1820s. It is of the original tree, which lies dead on the ground, and the re-rooted tree beside it. Keith had just been having a good look at it and discovered a new secret. We peered at it (have a look yourself) and could just make out the outline of Newton sitting underneath the tree. Keith had seen the picture countless times but had only just noticed the faintly drawn figure beneath it. ‘The archives are still turning up secrets,’ he said.
On a shelf beside the pieces of apple tree sits Newton’s reflecting telescope (he donated it to the Royal Society; they lost it for a while but it turned up again in the 1730s in an instrument maker’s workshop). It has two mirrors inside, and two tubes, which you slide to focus the mirrors.
Before Newton had the brainwave of using mirrors, looking at the stars meant holding two enormous and unwieldy lenses far apart, tied together by pieces of string. Newton mounted his old, big telescope on a maypole, which he’d bought on Charing Cross Road.
He invented this small, wood and leather reflecting telescope while he lived in Cambridge. Later,