The Hammer and The Feather

Posted on 1 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

I remember watching this when I was a kid and thinking that it was very cool indeed.

Today I picked it up from Astronomy Pic of the Day, which is on my daily checklist.

A famous experiment compliments of Apollo 15 back in 1971.

[wp_youtube]4mTsrRZEMwA[/wp_youtube]

Pres. Obama has made sure we won’t be going to the Moon again, or anywhere else, for a while.

I still haven’t gotten to my new book on Galileo, sent by a reader, but I look forward to it.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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6 Comments

  1. dcs says:
    1 November 2011 at 5:19 PM

    Pres. Obama has made sure we won’t be going to the Moon again, or anywhere else, for a while.

    I don’t think it’s that simple. The problems with the space program (which are largely due to the Shuttle program taking nearly all of NASA’s resources) go back further than 2009. Jerry Pournelle had some interesting insights on this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_69H-aoZOZ0

  2. marija says:
    1 November 2011 at 9:38 PM

    Studying Newton’s laws in homeschool science these days… will be showing the boys this video tomorrow. I think they will think it is cool too.

  3. NoraLee9 says:
    2 November 2011 at 5:19 AM

    I am continually astounded at how many people think the church is “anti-science,” and that one has to be a complete dunderhead to be a believer. As for the dust-up with Galileo back in the days, it had more to do with the fact that Galileo and the Pope had been friends, and then, (as happens between humans) weren’t friends anymore. Galileo started publishing some nasty tracts about his former friend and THAT is how the G-man ended up under house arrest.
    I seem to recall an FSSP priest who made the rounds of St. Agnes from time to time who was an actual college professor in one of the sciences. He often preached about how natural law lines up with G-d’s law.

  4. LisaP. says:
    2 November 2011 at 7:32 AM

    The kids and I are doing astronomy this year, and I periodically have a wave of sadness over the wasted opportunity. Human productivity has been so drastically accelerated, and since the “women’s movement” twice as many of us are theoretically in the workplace, yet we spend all our human resources on making a blingier cell phone and pushing papers around. If we had a competent school system and a sense of the moral worth of work we could be doing such things right now. . . .

    We’re reading Arthur C. Clarke stories, “The Nine Billion Names of God”, and I’m shocked by the things he knew in the sixties were coming. “I Remember Babylon” is so prescient it’s spooky. But my daughter laughed yesterday because one of the stories has manned space stations in the eighties. I don’t know, but Clarke was right about so many things — I bet we could have been there, if we’d wanted to. Maybe not thirty years ago, but by now.

  5. Brad says:
    2 November 2011 at 1:12 PM

    Wow the moon’s gravity is stronger than I had always pictured!

    Obummer may have nixed our moon aspirations, but at least since his acceptance speech, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…”…pompous buffoon.

  6. Supertradmum says:
    2 November 2011 at 4:57 PM

    As I understand the issues, Galileo was corrected by the Church for claiming in a famous letter to the Grand Duchess Christina that if there was a difference between science and Scripture, science came first. His error was that he saw a conflict and that science won always over the Church. The particular issue, the Copernican heliocentric theory, did upset some people, but the “heresy” dealt with man’s understanding over Revelation, a sticky point.

    Love the old video. We were a happier nation, then and more optimistic and less greedy.

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