A year ago, an interesting phenomenon unfolded on the internet — on “social media” even. Readers of the New York Times got the paper to correct bad science history. My hat is off to them. That is something I have not been able to do.
At 2:30 AM on March 24, 2023, the Times sent out a “tweet” on “Twitter”:
“Centuries after the Holy See muzzled and burned Roman Catholic stargazers for questioning the centrality of the Earth….”
The same thing appeared on “Facebook”. Both of these linked to a Times story, published online, that began with the same sentence — a story about asteroids that bear the names of Jesuit scientists.
But then, the readers of the Times challenged this statement. On Twitter, “Zdzislaw ‘zb007’ Brzezniak” asked, “Please list those ‘burned Roman Catholic stargazers’”.* Good job, 007. On Facebook, “Scott Williams” asked, “Please provide an example of someone the church ‘burned’ over astronomy.” And, rather more insistently, he said, “If you have a shred of integrity, you’ll offer a correction for the first line of this story, once you’ve done some research and discovered that the number of people the church burned for astronomy is zero.”
Another Times reader, “Michael Carbone” did not care: “Who they burned who they tortured who they slaughtered…. Im not splitting hairs”. But Williams would not be distracted from his point that the sentence is false. “Cause it’s false.” Burning people may be bad, “But the church didn’t ever do it for this reason. And that’s just a fact.”
There may have been others besides 007 and Williams. And do you know what? The Times edited the sentence. Now the story (click here for it) begins with “Centuries after the Holy See muzzled Roman Catholic stargazers [Galileo, presumably]….” And, importantly, the change was made before the story went to print — on the front page of the March 24, 2023 print edition of the Times.
We at the Vatican Observatory were happy to see that story. Jesuits at the VO featured prominently in it (as you can see, they put a picture of Br. Guy in it). We even mention the story in our 2023 Annual Report (click here for that).
But as an historian, I was particularly happy to see some bad history disappear — to see the front page of the Times saved from again hosting Galileo misinformation! — to see social media do something useful! Wow! Back in 2022 there was another front-page error in the Times, of the same nature (as I have discussed in a previous Sacred Space Astronomy post — click here for it). I tried to get the Times to change that error and had absolutely no luck whatsoever. But the Times readers and social media did the job this time. My hat is off to them.
*All the comments here were publicly visible, even to someone not on Twitter or Facebook.
