What a year for science! And a good year to be a science journalist, too, as we marked not only the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species (along with Darwin’s own 200th birthday), but also the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope. Although I’m a big fan of Darwin, astronomy and physics have long been my bread and butter, so it was Galileo who captured my attention through much of 2009. This spring I toured through Galileo’s Italy, and paid a visit to a world-class observatory on an Arizona mountaintop. (Among the results: A two-hour radio series titled “Looking Up” which aired recently on the CBC program Ideas; an article in The Walrus; and another radio documentary for the program Tapestry, set to air later this fall.)

Just seeing the sites associated with Galileo was a thrill: his birthplace in Pisa; the house in Padua where he first used the telescope; the site of his trial in Rome; the villa near Florence where he lived his final years under house arrest – along with a spectacular exhibit on the history of astronomy at the Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence.

On top of that, I had the privilege of witnessing a re-creation of Galileo’s famous “falling bodies” experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In fact, historians are skeptical as to whether Galileo actually carried out the experiment at the famous tower – but this spring, physicist Steve Shore definitely did. Amid much fanfare, he dropped water bottles of different sizes from the top of the tower, and you can see the results in my short video of the event. (Without giving too much away, let’s just say that Galileo would have been pleased with the results.)

In Arizona, I visited the Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory, where some of the word’s best telescope mirrors are made, before heading for the summit of Mount Graham to visit the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (the VATT, or, more affectionately, the “Pope scope”), one of two facilities run by the Vatican Observatory.

My host at the VATT was an astronomer named Guy Consolmagno, who also happens to be a Jesuit Brother; he also curates the Vatican’s extensive meteorite collection. We talked about many things that evening, but the issue I was most interested in exploring was the “science and religion” question – after all, Consolmagno works for the Vatican, the very institution that persecuted Galileo, the father of modern astronomy. (Consolmagno admits that when Pope Leo XIII founded the Vatican Observatory back in 1891, it was at least partly to show the world that the Roman Catholic Church was not anti-science – an allegation that had persisted ever since the time of Galileo’s trial.) It was clear that Consolmagno had completely reconciled his science with his faith. Make no mistake: Brother Guy is no fan of creationism, either in its traditional form or in its most recent incarnation as “intelligent design.” But he still believes that the universe is God’s handiwork; indeed, he sees the act of doing science as “a way of playing with the Creator.” (See the Walrus article for more on Consolmagno’s perspective on the relationship between science and faith.)

I certainly respect Consolmagno’s view – but it is not the only way to interpret what we see in the heavens. It certainly stands in sharp contrast to the views of Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Laureate physicist who I spoke with a few months later. Weinberg, of course, is an outspoken atheist, famous for having once written, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” (More than 30 years later, he still gets letters and e-mails about that line.) Weinberg and Consolmagno are both keenly aware of the vastness of the cosmos, but have drawn very different conclusions about it. The discoveries of science don’t disprove religion, Weinberg says, but he adds that the universe is “clearly not organized for our benefit”; indeed, it is “so vast and, generally speaking, so hostile” that it hardly seems the handiwork of “a benevolent Creator who had us in mind – or, I would say, who had life in mind, let alone us.”

Personally, I tend to sympathize more with Weinberg than Consolmagno; to admit the possibility of miracles, as Consolmagno does, strikes me as being problematic for anyone seeking naturalistic explanations for the world around us. Even so, the two men agree on the most important questions: 400 years after the “Galileo affair,” they both recognize that the Catholic Church made a terrible blunder in the way it treated the scientist, and that dogma should never be allowed to hinder scientific inquiry.