Filed Under (Meteorites in History) by geoking on 16-01-2009
I stole today’s title from my friend and former publisher, Dr. Joel Schiff, founder and original editor of Meteorite magazine. Every issue, he’d write a concise and thoughtful editorial under the heading “Down to Earth.” I always found it so very clever, since Joel is a thoughtful and down-to-earth person and — of course — meteorites are things which fall down to earth. Despite what the church thought back in the Middle Ages.
The reasoning went something like this: Since god was supposed to have created the heavens, and since — of course — anything that god created had to be perfect, then claiming that stones could fall from the heavens suggest that the heavens were not perfect. And that just wouldn’t do. The official viewpoint of the Roman Catholic Church was, therefore, that meteorites could not exist. Such logical reasoning!
That all changed on the afternoon of April 26, 1803 when literally thousands of stone meteorites rained down — in bright daylight — upon farmer’s fields in the French town of l’Aigle (”the eagle”). The eminent physicist Jean Baptiste Biot was dispatched to the scene, where he collected and described numerous freshly-fallen specimens. Over the centuries, those specimens found their way into prominent collections, and I once had the pleasure of handling some of those actual pieces in the secret basement collection room of the Museum of Natural History, London. With preserved fusion crust as black as liquorice and meticulously written specimen cards (all in French and with an appropriate fountain pen flourish), those fabulous historic and history-changing rocks took me right back to the earliest days of meteorite collecting.
Well, Biot’s resulting paper, supported by scores of eyewitness accounts meant the stubborn church views eventually had to give way. And the most interesting part about this tale is that even though the Vatican’s position was that meteorites could not exist, that viewpoint did not stop them from quietly putting together one of the world’s largest collections of space rocks. Despite the official company line, they knew something was going on. Or falling down, might be more accurate.
So, what do we learn from this 19th-Century story? Try to keep an open mind? The heavens actually are not perfect? Always take the word of a French physicist over the Pope? I’ll go with three out of three on that.
Watch the skies and please check out my latest science column: “Impactites: Ghostly Footprints of Ancient Meteorite Impacts” on Geology.com
