Monday, August 4, 2014

Beetlejuice and the Big Bang

Ask a Holy Cross student then or now what Betelgeuse is and 99 times out of 100 they'd tell you it's a movie directed by the renown Tim Burton, starring Michael Keaton, Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, and Winona Ryder. 


The major exception would be all the Navy ROTC students who were required to study celestial navigation and knew how to locate the super red giant star that sits on the shoulder of the constellation that some of us playfully called O'Ryan, the Hunter.   Profoundly ironic that the NROTC students, who some vituperatively said didn't belong there, were among the few at Holy Cross with any academic connection to the great tradition of Jesuit astronomy:  Clavius, Secchi and Lemaitre, father of the Big Bang, and I'm not talking a TV show. 


Ok, it's an anachronism to conflate 1960s Holy Cross with Tim Burton, but what's the difference between a blank stare and a crossword puzzle education, although there may be some karma involved here since Winona Ryder is the goddaughter of Holy Cross alumnus and notorious LSD guru Timothy Leary.