Over the weekend news broke that The Climate Science Coalition (made up of climate change sceptics and members of the extreme-right Act Party) are suing New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) over NIWA’s temperature record showing warming.

Poneke Blogs:

“But it is absurd to try to get a court to declare what is correct science. Science is a system where hypotheses are put forward and tested by evidence that proves or disproves them. To try to have a court declare the country’s temperature is hot or cold is just a stunt.”

When I see this action two things come to mind. The first is the most famous incident involving science vs the church vs the courts: Galileo. While the church won that battle in the short term, in the long term Galileo was shown to be correct and changed the face of science.

The second is how many other pieces of modern science could be challenged by political lobbyists and religious nutcases?  Within the field of computer science an emerging area of research in artificial intelligence is in the use of genetic algorithms to breed artificial agents in order to naturally select and improve their abilities. Are those people who don’t believe in evolution going to sue the scientists for using evolution in their research? How absurd can things get?

In Monday’s Sydney MX Newspaper (not online) there was an article about scientists discovering evidence to support the claim of the 10 biblical plagues as described in Exodus.

“The plagues are believed to have occurred at an ancient Nile Delta city of Pi-Rameses, the capital of Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses II and abandoned around 3000 years ago. Scientists claim the plagues could offer an explanation.

Climatologists say a dramatic climate shift created a dry period that triggered the first of the plagues, described as the Nile turning into blood.

This, the scientists say, was the toxic algae Burgundy Blood, which stains water red.

The algae set in motion the events that led to the second, third and fourth plagues – frogs, lice and flies.

The frogs would have been forced from the water, allowing mosquitoes, flies and other insects to flourish, and lead to the fifth and six plagues – diseased livestock and boils, infected by the insects.

The eruption of the volcano Thera more than 640km away is thought to be responsible for triggering the seventh, eighth and ninth plagues – hail, locusts and darkness, all caused by the effects of volcanic ash being blown into the atmosphere.

The cause of the final plague, the death of the first-borns of Egypt, is believed to be a fungus that may have poisoned the grain supplies, of which male first born would have had first pickings.”

There is a documentary on this on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday Night.

It is interesting that more than 3,000 years after the events of the exodus people are still studying what happened and developing theories for how things could have happened. If I had been in Egypt at that time and all this stuff happened as Moses had said it would I would be certainly believe that God is very real!

In the same way that science can now explain how things happened I find it still so very amazing that God can and does effect things in the world in such a way that science can show how things happen but not why they do! Only God truly knows the secrets of the universe but has given us the rules of science to help us discover them.

It is such a shame to see the church rebuke science as it does (and has done for the past few hundred years). If only the church would embrace scientific discoveries and work out how it fits into what the bible tells us – that would be a fantastic way for the church to be real and relevant to today’s society.

On the bus to uni this morning I read a really interesting article on a possible link between myopia and the amount of time spent outside.

The article is in a last November issue of New Scientist Magazine – Generation specs: Stopping the short-sight epidemic. To get the full picture make sure you read the full article it is very informative, but to keep with New Scientist’s 200 word extract policy here are the highlights:

Today, in some of the worst-affected countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, around 80 per cent of young adults are myopic, compared to only 25 per cent a few decades back.

Rates are lower in western countries – between 30 and 50 per cent – but myopia seems to be rising steadily here too. What could be causing this mysterious epidemic? It is clear that genetics alone can’t explain the condition, and the long-standing theory that reading was to blame has failed to play out in subsequent studies.

The article then goes on to explain a possible link between the amount of time spent outside in bright natural sunlight and looking further ahead to build depth perception and its effects on the development of short-sightedness.

Since time spent indoors seemed to be such an important risk factor, Saw and Rose asked whether it might explain the extraordinarily high prevalence of short-sightedness in Asia. To find out, they compared two groups of 6 to 7-year-old children, one in Singapore and one in Australia. The team looked only at children of Chinese ethnicity, to rule out genetic differences between races as an explanation for higher myopia rates in certain countries.

The result? On average the children in Sydney spent nearly 14 hours per week outside, and only 3 per cent developed myopia. In contrast, the children in Singapore spent just 3 hours outside, and 30 per cent developed myopia.

I don’t have any real issue with my eyes but I do suffer eye strain at times from over using electronics, but maybe those stories my mom used to tell me about developing square eyes hold some truth.

Very interesting article in New Scientist this week about a possible link between exam grades and becoming bipolar.

Straight-A students are more likely to develop bipolar disorder than their more mediocre peers, at least in Sweden, according to a new study of more than 700,000 former high-school students.

Within 15 years of sitting their final high-school exams, aged 15 and 16, at least 280 of the students were diagnosed with bipolar disorder. After taking into account their parents’ income and education – factors that are known to affect exam scores – the highest-achieving students were more than three times more likely to suffer from the mental illness than their average peers.

Male overachievers, meanwhile, developed the disease 4.4 times more often than their average male classmates.

The stereotype of the brilliant but tortured artist aside, some aspects of manic episodes could reflect increased intelligence, he says. “People who have a biological predisposition to bipolar disorder have advantages, I suppose you could call them, in that they’re able to think clearly, think fast and concentrate,” MacCabe says.

700,000 is a massive sample size so it should mean that the study is quite a good one. However, it is limited only to Sweden school students it would be interesting to see if these results were reflected elsewhere in both first world and third world countries. Could mental illness be a by-product of technological, sociological and the complexities of the modern world on the human brain?

The Vice-Chancellor of Auckland University has an interesting article in the Herald today about education funding:

Over the last thirty years, our educational institutions have created a $2.3 billion per annum export education industry – now the fifth largest export earner in the country. We can surely do it again with research.

So what would I do to bring about this change?

I would invest in education, valuing our teachers – from pre-school to professors – as the professionals they truly are. I would focus on supporting our most able students to continue on to postgraduate study and research careers, rather than terminating the very scholarships that keep our best doctoral students in New Zealand, as the government has recently done.

The removal of the highest value scholarships for PhD students by the incoming National government was an incredibly silly thing to do.

Look at the number and value of scholarships available to Australians and New Zealanders provided by the Australian Government. Look at the way they are offering massive incentives to our young doctors to move to the lucky country. It is little wonder we have such a big brain drain when our smartest are being snatched by our neighbour. And it will require more than a rugby team and national pride to keep them here.

Sadly New Zealand has been reducing its investment in the tertiary education of each student for 20 years, choosing instead to directly support students, most recently with interest free loans. This must inevitably compromise the quality of education and research at a time when other countries are investing heavily in these areas.

Interest free student loans are a good thing for supporting students and giving them opportunities they would have been unable to otherwise afford. However, as I blogged a few days ago there needs to be much tighter controls on who is allowed at university to reduce wasteful spending on those who are never going to complete their degree.

I would concentrate our research investment on “blue skies” projects, the kind that will create radical innovation, and with it undreamt-of opportunities.

After all, the single most important technology in New Zealand’s history, refrigeration, came out not because of attempts to preserve dairy and meat products so they could be exported – though that was what it achieved – but rather from fundamental university research on the thermodynamics of expanding gases.

At the moment a lot of new products come out of private enterprise in New Zealand. Most of these products are not mainstream consumer products either but rather for specialised industry. However, little of these products are information sciences based, instead they are physical products. Investing in information sciences based research at university and CRI level makes sense. If we want to succeed in the knowledge economy we must first join it (by getting into the top half and higher of the OECD averages) then we must actively lead the way in new ventures in the economy and not just follow what others are doing. How about getting past web 2.0 and start thinking about cloud 3.0?

I have been watching the whole climategate saga for a few weeks now. So far I have not blogged on it because I was hoping that it would either be shown to be such the stupid smokescreen that it really is, or that there would be some truth to it and there would be some form of outcome. However, as it stands at the moment both sides are claiming victory over a situation that has become very messy.

If you are not already up to play on the situation Wikipedia (as always) provides a good overview of the mess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident

In a nutshell: sometime in November (or earlier) the computers are the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked and a large amount of emails and other data were then selective leaked onto the internet. The right wingers/nutcases/conspiracy theorist/deniers claim that this stolen data shows collusion amongst climate researchers in deliberately trying to prove climate change is man made when the data shows a decline in global temperatures. Of course this is complete and utter nonsense, the content of the emails that have been leaked are damaging to the reputation of a few scientists. However, they completely fail to prove any worldwide conspiracy.

There are two great articles that have been produced dismissing the points that have attempted to be made by climategate. The first is from New Scientist:

We can be 100 per cent sure the world is getting warmer

Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you’ll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.

You can’t fake spring coming earlier, or trees growing higher up on mountains, or glaciers retreating for kilometres up valleys, or shrinking ice cover in the Arctic, or birds changing their migration times, or permafrost melting in Alaska, or the tropics expanding, or ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula breaking up, or peak river flow occurring earlier in summer because of earlier snowmelt, or sea level rising faster and faster, or any of the thousands of similar examples.

Is it possible that tens of thousands of scientists have got it wrong? It is incredibly unlikely. The evidence that CO2 levels are rising is irrefutable, and the idea that rising levels lead to warming has withstood more than a century of genuine scientific scepticism.

The second is from the academic journal Nature:

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ‘smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

Back in New Zealand we have had our own little mini conspiracy theory with Ian Wishart among others trying to claim that NIWA have deliberately altered their data to artificially create a warming trend. The truth is they have deliberately altered their data but only to adjust changes in the physical locations of weather stations. NIWA has close to a 100 years of data and over time both the way in which you collect data and the instruments use change as a result the data collected by one method has to be adjusted to match up with the data collected through a different method. This is standard scientific practice. In fact if you didn’t do this any analysis done over time would be wrong! But because the scientists at NIWA have done the right thing the crazy climate change deniers are claiming a conspiracy.
So here we have NIWA with this plot of adjusted data:

and the deniers with this plot of unadjusted data:

The most interesting thing about both of these plots is in the end of both of them I can see an overall rise trending!

A few days ago NIWA responded to the nutcases who are claiming conspiracy everywhere by producing a plot of only the 11 weather stations that have not been moved or adjusted (see below) note that the rise is 1C and the P-Value (extremely small this an absolutely confirmed rise there is no arguing with it). Now the conspiracy crazies are claiming the graph should include all weather stations and thus a circle begins.

For more on the stupidity of Climategate there are some good blogs on Open Parachute:

• Climate Change Deniers Live In Glass Buildings
• New Zealand’s Climate Change Deniers Distortions Exposed

Finally I will leave the last word with Jon Stewart’s take on the whole saga:

The news this morning from NASA that their LCROSS probe impact with the moon has unearthed water on the moon.

“In the first look at results from the LCROSS mission, which sent a probe crashing into the Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole, NASA’s main investigator said their instruments clearly detected water, despite the underwhelming plume.

Within the field of view of their instruments, the team measured approximately 220 pounds or about 26 gallons of water.” – http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/lcross-water-ice/

This news is potentially massive for any future missions to the moon or even the possibilities of establishing a future permanent moon base. If there is a fresh source of water on the moon it makes the options around supporting a permanent human crew a lot easier.

I can see it now: moon based hydroelectric power dams.

When I was in Sydney a few months back I picked up a book at the airport to read on my flight home entitled “The Genesis Enigma – Why The Bible Is Scientifically Accurate”. I was surprised to find what at first I considered to be a creationist book in the popular science section of an airport bookshop. Furthermore the book is written by Dr Andrew Parker an Honorary Research Fellow of Green Templeton College at Oxford University, Research Leader at the Natural History Museum and a Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University none of which are the typical credentials of a creationist.

The book takes a very different approach from most books on God, science and the origins of the universe. The typical approach is to use the bible as a literal roadmap of creation and then tweak the science to make it fit the bible stories. However, Parker takes the opposite approach in The Genesis Enigma by outlining the science of the origins of the universe and life and then tests if the bible can line up with this. Surprisingly with a little less literal interpretation of the bible it does.

The main thesis of the book is:

• The bible is a historically accurate record of people and events.
• The six days of creation are not a literal six days but instead refer to the order in which science now reveals the universal comes into being. Something that no one writing a religious book a few thousand years ago would have been able to know, or understand unless the knowledge came through divine intervention.
• The evolution is an undisputable scientific fact. However atheism is not a fact or theory it is as much a religion as any other faith based religious belief.
• There is more to life and God than just science. And science cannot explain everything in the world. Science is not the be all and end all of explaining the meaning and purpose of life.

Overall the main ideas in the book make a lot of sense and while I do not necessarily agree with all of them it has provoked my intellectual thought around the subject. The end of the book also finishes with a discussion of intelligent design and atheism which is very interesting independent of the rest of the book. In particular:

“One’s reaction to the science versus religion debate is a very personal choice. Do you believe that science will take such huge steps, changing the way in which it works today, as to be able to answer those big questions in the universe? Or do you choose God? To borrow from C. S. Lewis, do you believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, or that there is a great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest? Creationism and atheism are neither scientific theories nor demonstrably true. If we do not allow them to cloud our judgement then God can appear as a rational answer as to why we exist on earth.”

Furthermore Parker makes a very strong case for divine intervention in the authorship of the bible by stating:

“That Aaronid priest who wrote the Bible’s first page, or Moses who may have given the ancient Israelites their creation account originally, lacked any interest in natural history. Although demonstrating attention to detail in other subjects – geography, politics, economics, law – this Aaronid priest and the character Moses, provide us with no signs of biological inclination. The scientific method, necessary to decipher the true account of how the universe formed and life evolved, with its repeatable experiments, was yet to manifest itself. The ancient Israelites were not conducting scientific experiments in their sheds – if they were, they would have written about it, as they did about everything else they did. The writer of the Bible’s first page simply roamed the desert or traversed the dusty streets of ancient Jerusalem during the day, and marvelled at the stars at night. He was without so much as a magnifying lens.

Indeed, the history books tell us that science and natural history began some centuries later with the ancient Greeks, who were influenced by very different natural surroundings. So, in terms of providing an explanation for how the universe and life came to be, the Aaronid priest given this task, or the character Moses, would not have had a clue. All the same, something was written. And it made its way to pride of place in the Bible.

As such, unprovided with evidence of any kind, the creation account on the Bible’s opening page might be assumed a fantasy. But the Genesis Enigma has told us that those enigmatic phases that ignite the Bible actually mean something – they are scientifically accurate. That would be an outrageous assertion, were it not true. The conclusion that this page of the Bible could, perhaps more than any other, represent God’s hand in the Bible. The true account of how we came to exist may have been handed to humans by God.

In any case, our strong preconception that science has, with each discovery chipped away at the notion of God is proved wrong in this book. Now we can live with the real possibility that God exists while fully accepting the science, rather than straining to find contradictions. Faith suddenly appears that much stronger.”

Now as I stated earlier I do not necessary accept or agree with everything Parker has outlined in his book.  The remaining question for me is that if God is able to put in places the rules that govern the universe that make evolution work on both a small scale (as now commonly accepted by most creationists) and a large scale (as Parker and most of the secular scientific world believes) then why does God just stop there? If God can do all this stuff that makes the world tick over then why can he not decide to play with the rules and create a literal six day creation as well? It is not designed to make us confused about how old the world is, but rather to demonstrate that God ultimately has the power to influence and change the universe. It is about demonstrating that God is in control and not science.

After reading the book and pondering some of the ideas raised in it I went back and read some of the creationism based “science” that I had blindly followed from a few years ago. What I have discovered is that by arguing that evolution is nothing more than a myth and controlled “brainwashing” people they are essentially doing the same thing with “creationism”. Statements such as “long years of educational brainwashing in the mythology of evolutionary theory “ plant ideas in the minds of people that they have been brainwashed, ironically by planting these ideas creationists are doing nothing more than the same thing! Furthermore, the contradictions in their arguments and statements just scream this out.

For instance Chuck Missler who is well known for his Bible commentary and in particular his study on Daniel’s 70 weeks where he shows they are not a literal 70 weeks but weeks of years states here: http://www.khouse.org/articles/2004/528/ that the earth was created in six literal days because the bible says so. However, the bible does not directly say Daniel had 70 weeks of years, no it just says 70 weeks. So how do you determine when there is a literal meaning and where there is not? Furthermore Missler shoots himself in the foot in another article on the site where he argues there is a gap between God creating the heavens and the earth and the actual six day creation: http://www.khouse.org/articles/2008/821/ this makes no sense because now in one place he is arguing in an absolute six day creation, and another he argues there is a gap. What one is it?

Or for instance the finding of a city under the Black Sea as evidence for a worldwide flood http://www.khouse.org/articles/2000/299/ when anyone with any knowledge of geology would brush this off as evidence of the plates of the earth shifting and changing over the years. This is not to say that the ideas of intelligent design are completely dead in the water Kent Hovind poses some good questions that have still not be fully answered by science, in particular:

• Without a creator how did time, space, and matter came into existence by themselves?
• How and why did matter create life by itself?
• How and why did early life-forms learn to reproduce themselves?
• How and why did major changes occur between diverse life forms (i.e., fish changed to amphibians, amphibians changed to reptiles, and reptiles changed to birds or mammals).

The biggest problem with creationism is the way in which they throw out solid science and replace it with arguments that the Bible says this happened so it must be true. This would be the same as arguing the world is made of the Greek Classical Elements (Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Aether) because this is what was written on Greek tablets a few thousand years ago. The reality is the stories written in the Bible were written firstly for the understanding of the people who lived at the time the stories were written. Yes the Bible and the stories in it still have a huge amount of relevance today, however, we cannot take every single word as literal because the very first thing we would be worshipping is a lamb and not a person who lived 2000 years ago.

The Wired Twitter account describes this idea as the “Best. Theory. Ever.” I would tend to agree.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=3

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

Why God destroy the so called God Particle? It is something that could potentially hypothetically prove the existance of God, without blind reglious faith.

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.

Dr. Nielsen called that “a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.”

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.

Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”

Another of Dr. Nielsen’s projects is an effort to show how the universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise from pure randomness, a subject he calls “random dynamics.”

Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

I have edited out about half the article, so go and read the full thing at the NY Times, but interesting stuff. So can we conclude that Time Travel is real? Or at least now a realistic theory?

The TVNZ midday news just reported that the Vatican Museum is to open an exhibition on Galileo and 400 years since his observations showing the earth is round and we orbit around the sun. This has to be one of the most ironic news storys I have heard in a long time. It is the equivalent of the US Army Museum holding an exhibition on why the Viet Cong won the Vietnam War.

The Associated Press reports: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gVhVS3vYYvAwfSrJIEVG0lZK7mLAD9BAAQA80

VATICAN CITY — Rudimentary telescopes, celestial globes and original manuscripts by Galileo are going on view at the Vatican Museums as part of an exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of the astronomer’s first celestial observations.

“Astrum 2009: Astronomy and Instruments” traces the history of astronomy through its tools, from a 3rd century A.D. globe of the zodiac to the increasingly complicated telescopes used in more recent times to gaze at the stars.

At a briefing to launch the exhibit Tuesday, Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s top culture official, declined to revisit the Church’s 17th century condemnation of Galileo for his discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun.

Church teaching at the time placed the Earth at the center of the universe.

Rather, Ravasi said that, while it was necessary to have the courage to admit errors when they were made, “I continue to believe that it’s necessary to look more to the future.”

The church denounced Galileo’s theory as dangerous to the faith. Tried as a heretic in 1633 and forced to recant, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, later changed to house arrest.

The ruling helped fuel accusations that the church was hostile to science — a reputation the Vatican has been trying to shed ever since.

In 1992, Pope John Paul II declared that the ruling against Galileo was an error resulting from “tragic mutual incomprehension.”

The exhibit, and other Vatican initiatives to mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope and the U.N.-designated International Year of Astronomy, is part of the Vatican’s continuing rehabilitation effort.

One of the highlights of the show is Galileo’s original manuscript of “Sidereus Nuncius,” the 1610 document in which he excitedly recorded his first discoveries after using his telescope.

Tommaso Maccacaro, president of Italy’s national institute of astrophysics, said it was important to look at the instruments not just from a scientific view but from a cultural one as well, since astronomy has had such an impact on the way we perceive ourselves.

“It was astronomical observations that let us understand that Earth (and man) don’t have a privileged position or role in the universe,” he said in his prepared comments to the briefing. “I ask myself what tools will we use in the next 400 years, and I ask what revolutions of understanding they’ll bring about, like resolving the mystery of our apparent cosmic solitude.”

The exhibit opens Friday and runs through Jan. 16.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

It is very funny that the Vatican wishes to hold an exhibition on Galileo in order to shred the image that is hostile to science. However at the same time it is not prepared to discuss the treatment of Galileo and would prefer instead to focus on the future.