Making sense of the night sky

Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” has such a transcendent quality, I wonder whether he was stargazing when he composed it in 1927.

The song has long been a favorite of mine, and I was reminded of it recently when I attended a talk by Dr. George V. Coyne, S.J.

Fr. Coyne served as director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 until his recent retirement. He met with faculty and students at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University over a two-day visit, March 18-19, and gave a public lecture at SJU’s Pellegrene Auditorium.

The lecture was well attended by students, and also attracted representatives of diverse interests from our community. I recognized professors from the sciences, of course. Professors from the humanities attended, as did a number of monks from Saint John’s Abbey, including Abbot John Klassen, who is well known for his interest in the intersection of faith and reason.

Fr. Coyne, for all his scientific brilliance, also has the ability to communicate scientific thought to a general audience in a way that does not condescend. In little more than an hour, he took us on a 13.7 billion-year journey, from the beginning of the universe to the present, in a lecture poetically titled “The Dance of the Fertile Universe: Chance and Destiny Embrace.”

As the title suggests, he explored the question: “Did we come about by chance or by necessity in the evolving universe?” To that question he added the essential quality of fertility, arguing that the fertility of the universe increases the potential for life as chance and destiny collide.

For me, the carryout message – the message I carried out to my car and carry around in my mind to this day – is this: we are the descendents of stars, or star dust, if you will – or, to paraphrase a colleague of Fr. Coyne, from thermonuclear waste.

Each time a star dies, its remains are cast off as stellar dust, rich in chemical complexity. As the universe evolved, so, too, did the chemical composition of star dust. As Fr. Coyne explained, three generations of stars were required to produce the chemical makeup of an amoeba.

Each generation of stars has escalated the possibilities for the evolution of life, to the extent that, through an exponential combination of chance and destiny, I sat one day in Pellegrene Auditorium, listening to a scientist explain our self awareness of how we came to be there, reflecting on our existence.

During the question-and-answer session, Fr. Coyne made the offhand comment that many of today’s prestigious scientists explore truth only within the confines of their specific disciplines, while ignoring insights available in music, literature, poetry, the visual arts. He thought this a sad commentary.

I agree. While I don’t pretend to grasp every nuance of Fr. Coyne’s lecture, the ideas he presented are now a part of my sense of wonder when I gaze upon the night sky, and when I listen to “Stardust.”

For the basic text of Fr. Coyne’s lecture, visit www.aei.org/docLib/20051027_HandoutCoyne.pdf