{"id":6266,"date":"2006-08-28T13:27:47","date_gmt":"2006-08-28T13:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/scientists-and-priests.html"},"modified":"2006-08-28T13:27:47","modified_gmt":"2006-08-28T13:27:47","slug":"scientists-and-priests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/scientists-and-priests.html","title":{"rendered":"Scientists and Priests"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Barr offers a brief intro at First Things.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

An extremely important effect in physics called the \u201cdiffraction\u201d of light was discovered by Fr. Francesco Grimaldi<\/span><\/a> in the seventeenth century (something no physics textbook that I have ever seen bothers to mention, so that few scientists are aware of it). One of the top biologists in the world in the eighteenth century was Fr. Lazzaro Spallanzani<\/span><\/a>. Among his many accomplishments was to disprove the theory of \u201cspontaneous generation.\u201d (Pasteur later made use of Spallanzani\u2019s work in doing his own famous experiments disproving spontaneous generation.) <\/p>\n

Fr. Marin Mersenne<\/span><\/a> is considered the \u201cfather of acoustics.\u201d Many of the basic facts about wave motion and sound that are taught in freshman physics courses were discovered by Mersenne (though, again, textbooks never mention this). The first \u201cbinary star\u201d was discovered by Fr. Giovanni Riccioli<\/span><\/a>. One of the founders of modern astrophysics was Fr. Angelo Secchi<\/span><\/a>. Priests also figure prominently in the history of mathematics, including Nicholas Oresme<\/span><\/a>, fourteenth-century bishop of Lisieux, who was the first to graph mathematical functions and who discovered how to combine exponents (he also had important ideas in physics); Girolamo Saccheri<\/span><\/a>, a forerunner of non-Euclidean geometry; Francesco Cavalieri<\/span><\/a>, who made important contributions to the foundation of integral calculus; and Bernhard Bolzano<\/span><\/a>, one of the people who helped put calculus and the theory of real numbers on a more rigorous basis.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Barr offers a brief intro at First Things. An extremely important effect in physics called the \u201cdiffraction\u201d of light was discovered by Fr. Francesco Grimaldi in the seventeenth century (something no physics textbook that I have ever seen bothers to mention, so that few scientists are aware of it). One of the top biologists…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nScientists and Priests - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/scientists-and-priests.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Scientists and Priests - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Stephen Barr offers a brief intro at First Things. An extremely important effect in physics called the \u201cdiffraction\u201d of light was discovered by Fr. Francesco Grimaldi in the seventeenth century (something no physics textbook that I have ever seen bothers to mention, so that few scientists are aware of it). 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}