The relics of St. Bernadette have been on a whistlestop tour of Ireland and have now been returned to Lourdes. According to the Catholic Church these relics are to be venerated but not adored. Many believe that they can heal the sick or offer protection. I remember learning in History class that selling a relic is the sin of simony. The opening lines from Behan’s The Confirmation Suit “For weeks, it was nothing but simony and sacrilege” often resonate in my head still.
There are a few secular scientific relics which I don’t exactly venerate but I am curious about.
Physics teachers are all aware of the Shroud of Turin and Carbon-14 dating. Most textbooks reference it. Is it fake or real? I’m not sure but it is a major tourist attraction for Turin. I am drawn to the more macabre relics. (As if a blood-stained cloth is not macabre enough?) I am like the little “Guru of Gore” from Arundati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things. The more lurid it is, the more I want to know. I am not that interested in Marie Curie’s radioactive notebooks or a napkin which Feynmann may have scribbled equations on, but just look at what happened to Einstein’s brain after he died!
In 1955, the pathologist, Thomas Harvey stole Einstein’s brain while performing the autopsy. He promised to get the greatest specialists to examine it to reveal its secrets. He cut it up, sending samples to neuropathologists but he hung onto the bulk of the brain himself. Some say it was a cursed relic as he subsequently lost his job, his marriage and the career in Princeton he had dreamt of. The brain was forgotten about until 1978 when a reporter found Harvey living in obscurity in Wichita. This caused a renewed interest and many attempts to correlate the brain’s features with Einstein’s genius. Many of these studies were inconclusive or were accused of confirmation bias. Harvey eventually handed the 170 chunks of the brain to Princeton. (A surreal side story is the book Driving Mr. Albert written by a journalist Michael Paterniti who went on a road trip with Harvey and Einstein’s brain floating in formaldehyde in a Tupperware bowl)
Another interesting Physics relic is Edison’s last breath stored in a test tube and presented to his friend, Henry Ford. Edison and Ford had an interest in reanimation. The legend is that Edison’s son, Charles held a test tube next to his father’s mouth to catch his last breath. The hope was that the technology of the future could resurrect him. Sadly, the truth is a little more prosaic as there were eight test tubes next to his bed as he lay dying. The test tube which was given to Ford did show up in Ford’s estate in 1950 after Clara Ford died. There have been no reports so far of a reanimated Edison.
My favourite relic is Galileo’s finger. The Catholic Church did not want him buried on consecrated ground because of his views on heliocentrism. So, his remains were buried close to a chapel (a heretic’s grave). A pupil of Galileo’s left his fortune in his will to be used to build a mausoleum. Due to delays by the Church and by the pupil’s heir, Galileo’s remains were eventually transferred nearly one hundred years after his death to the mausoleum. During this process, some of Galileo’s fingers were cut off. His middle finger is now encased in a glass egg in the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy.
It took the Catholic Church four hundred years to apologise to Galileo. I like to think that he is “flipping the bird” from beyond the grave to all of those who doubt science.
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