Who's Nininger?
On Nov 15, 2009, at 3:52 PM, Meteorites USA wrote:
An eye on the sky, one on the ground
By Christopher Cokinos
Posted: 11/15/2009 01:00:00 AM MST
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_13776988
Meteorite expert Harvey Nininger. (Courtesy of the American
Meteorite Laboratory Photo Collection, Collections Research for
Museums, Denver )
The International Year of Astronomy is drawing to a close, and it's
been marked by some notable passages. We've celebrated the 400th
anniversary of Galileo's first view through a telescope, and we've
looked back 40 years to the first Apollo moon landing.
This month, another anniversary has taken place, but one quite
obscure except to some dealers, collectors and researchers of
meteorites. Eighty-six years ago, on Nov. 9, 1923, a then-unknown,
middle-aged science professor named Harvey Nininger was walking home
from work in McPherson, Kan. Suddenly, he saw a huge meteor so vivid
that eyewitnesses would remember the event for years to come.
The fireball would also change the course of Harvey's life and the
course of science. Nininger anticipated an insight about life and
death on our planet decades before it became widely accepted by
researchers and then became the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.
When the meteor vanished from his view on that chilly evening,
Nininger marked the sidewalk where he stood. He knew that if he
received enough reports from eyewitnesses, he could triangulate
their accounts and have a rough sense of where meteorites might have
fallen. (Meteors are the passage of burning objects from space into
our atmosphere; meteorites are the heavy, usually dark rocks that
sometimes fall from them to Earth.)
Nininger's idea was a radical one. No one had attempted to search
for meteorites where none had been seen to fall, and a leading
geologist once told Nininger that if he spent the rest of his life
looking for meteorites he might find one. The geologist was wrong.
Though Nininger didn't find any space rocks from that Nov. 9
fireball, in the years ahead he'd find hundreds from other falls.
Nininger believed that more meteorites could be discovered from
unwitnessed or forgotten falls by simply scouring the countryside.
He was proven right on that count as well.
After quitting his $3,000-a-year teaching job at McPherson College
(during the Great Depression!), Nininger moved his family to Denver,
where in 1930 he became a part-time curator of meteorites at the
Colorado Museum of Natural History. The museum paid him just $600 a
year, so Nininger had to rely on his obsession and his wits to make
a living at buying, selling, finding, displaying, popularizing and
researching meteorites. No one had done anything like it before in
the study of space rocks, which was then a backwater of geology.
With help from Denver truck magnate Dean Gillespie, Nininger criss-
crossed the continent, from Saskatoon to Chihuahua City, discovering
newly fallen meteorites and ones that had languished in ditches,
corn fields, even attics. He proved that iron meteorites were not
the most common ones to fall, but that they were "selected" for
discovery because they look so alien and weigh so much. He recovered
1,200 pounds of a rare stony-iron meteorite from a Kansas field.
When most people still thought craters on the moon had been formed
by volcanoes, Nininger and a few others begged to differ, suggesting
they must have formed by the impacts of meteorites. He was right
once more. And 40 years before scientists would link the extinction
of the dinosaurs to an asteroid's collision with the planet,
Nininger suggested that cosmic impacts could lead to global mass
extinctions.
A tireless worker, Nininger did find time during his Denver years to
be active with the Boy Scouts and take his children to concerts.
They watched the colored lights of the fountain at City Park,
recalls Nininger's daughter, Doris Banks. Winter car trips meant
that Harvey would warm up iron meteorites at home, then wrap them in
blankets to place on the floorboard, thus keeping everyone toasty.
I suppose not many Denverites today remember the name Harvey
Nininger, but until World War II he was one of the city's most
prominent scientific citizens. He was also known nationally from
profiles in publications like The Saturday Evening Post.
Eventually, he moved his family to Arizona, where he opened the
world's only museum of meteorites and where his pursuits continued,
at times, to get him in hot water. For example, Nininger didn't have
a Ph.D., but he when he was awarded an honorary doctorate he began
calling himself "Dr. Nininger," at least on his letterhead.
His love of meteorites became a family affair. His son-in-law, Glenn
Huss, took over Nininger's "American Meteorite Laboratory" in Denver
for many years. Glenn's son, Gary, has become one of the world's
best-known researchers of meteorites and the solar system.
Tonight, go outside and watch the sky for a meteor. Look for the
Leonid meteor shower when it peaks on Tuesday night and Wednesday
morning. And remember that a few rare souls don't just make a wish
when they see a meteor. Instead, they work hard to make that wish
real. So it was with Harvey Nininger, Denver's original "meteorite
man."
Christopher Cokinos is a professor at Utah State University and
author of "The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting
Stars" (Tarcher/Penguin July 2009).
-------------------------------------------------------
Vatican's eye on the heavens
By ERIC BERGER
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Nov. 14, 2009, 9:58PM
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6721242.html
Brother Guy Consolmagno is curator of the meteorite collection at
Vatican City.
Brother Guy Consolmagno, the curator of meteorites at the Vatican
Observatory, will give a free public lecture at 7:30 p.m. Thursday
at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, 3600 Bay Area Blvd. in the
Clear Lake area. Before coming to Houston, he spoke with science
writer Eric Berger about what the pope's astronomers do, about
Galileo and about the fate of Pluto.
Q: What does a Vatican astronomer do?
A: There are 15 Jesuits and one diocesan priest involved at the
Vatican Observatory, and basically 12 of us are astronomers and the
others help out with administration. We do astronomy. When I was
hired I was told one thing: Do good science. We each have our own
programs, ranging from cosmology and string theory all the way to
planetary science and meteor dust. We all do regular science,
collaborating with other scientists around the world. Our group
comes from four different continents and probably speaks a dozen
languages. For my own particular work I do planetary science, so I'm
the curator of the meteorite collection, and I do a lot of physical
studies of meteorites, their density, porosity, thermal properties.
And the goal of doing these measurements is to be able to understand
the conditions under which these rocks were formed 4.5 billion years
ago in the early solar system, and also to give us an idea about the
materials that made the planets.
Q: I take it the church no longer persecutes its astronomers.
A: Certainly the Catholic Church did wrong by Galileo, everybody
admits that. The history of what exactly happened is a lot more
confusing than the mythology. I don't claim to know the truth more
than anyone else. The odd thing is, what happened to Galileo is sort
of contrary to the whole tradition of the church supporting science,
and even supporting Galileo most of his life. It had to be a rude
shock to him because up until about 1630, he was in his late 60s
then, he had had nothing but support from the majority of the
church. The pope was his friend. Then suddenly he was brought to
trial for a book that had been published with church approval. After
the trial he was allowed to stay with his friend, the cardinal of
Sienna, and eventually go home. Those years during the trial were
just a very odd, odd anomaly. The best theory I've heard is that it
had to do with the fact that the Thirty Years War was going on, and
it was all tied up in local politics. But that doesn't make anywhere
near as cute a story as the church being anti-science.
Q: Some 400 years later there's still a lot of tension between
science and religion in the United States.
A: I think that comes from scientists who are not really comfortable
with religion because they don't know it very well; the religion
they know is what they learned when they were 12 years old. And many
religious people are not comfortable with science because they don't
know science very well. Face it, most people stopped learning
science and religion when they were about 12 years old, so they have
a very childish understanding of both: Religion is a big book of
rules and science is a big book of facts. Fortunately, neither is
true.
Q: Why should science and faith co-exist?
A: The fact is, they do. The hardest thing I've had in my job of
talking about this is trying to figure out why anyone would think
they couldn't. It's a funny thing. I was a scientist for 15 years
before I entered the Jesuits, and most of my friends in the science
world had no idea about my religious life, any more than I knew
theirs, because it's private. But when I became a Jesuit I was
surprised at how many of them came up to me and said, “Oh, that's
wonderful. Let me tell you about the church I go to.”
Q: Does the pope think Pluto should be a planet?
A: The Catholic Church does not take official positions on matters
of science. We learned that lesson from Galileo, thank you.
Q: Well, what do you think? Should Pluto be a planet? (In 2006
astronomers declared it no longer should be considered a planet.)
A: I was actually deeply involved in that whole discussion — as was
Chris Corbally from our group, who helped write the final definition
— because the Vatican Observatory is a member of the International
Astronomical Union. In retrospect, although it wasn't the way I
voted at the time, now that I've lived with it for three years I
think they made the right choice.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Enjoy...
Regards,
Eric Wichman
Meteorites USA
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