The Secret Museum. Molly Oldfield

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      There are also three pieces of Mars. Each piece of Mars rock is from a different part of the planet. How do we know they are from Mars? Firstly, because other meteorites contain metals and Mars rocks do not. Secondly, they are a billion years old, which is young, compared to the 4,568 billion-year ages of the other meteorites. And, thirdly, bubbles of gas trapped inside them have been tested using a mass spectrometer, and it turns out that they exactly match the atmosphere of Mars, as recorded by the Mars Rover.

      The Vatican also has a globe of Mars, showing the channels on the planet, and a globe of the moon, the first ever made by NASA, given to the Vatican as a gift.

      I asked Brother Guy if he had a favourite treasure in the collection. He said that it changed all the time; he loves the Mars rocks, but his favourite meteorite that day was Allende. There are two tons of it in the world and it revolutionized science. ‘It fell in 1969, just before the moon landing. NASA had been buying all sorts of toys with which to measure moon rocks, which they hoped the astronauts would bring back to Earth. So they were able to test their toys on Allende. They discovered that the little white bits inside the meteorite were dust from stars that existed even before the planets were formed. This changed the way NASA thought about the solar system; they had known it was about 4.6 billion years old but, thanks to Allende, they could measure the age more precisely, to 4.568 billion’.

      Brother Guy got even more cosmic. ‘It’s strange to think that we humans – who are all made of stardust – look up at the sky to study galaxies, without often reflecting on the fact that what we’re actually studying is light. The things we’re looking at are no longer really there.’ That is one reason why he likes working in the meteorite lab, among the ‘real stuff’, which he can pick up and measure.

      We decided to visit his lab, but to have a drink first. Over a delicious coffee, which Brother Guy served in ‘Specola Vaticana’ cups, he told me how he had ended up as curator of meteorites at the Vatican. He grew up in Detroit. He loved space and saved up 16 books of stamps to swap for his first telescope. He joined the Jesuit order and it was they who decided that this was the job for him. He says he would have been just as happy serving soup, if that is what the Jesuits had decided, but he is surely the perfect man for the job here at the Vatican.

      Inside his lab, one surface is covered with microscopes and one weird instrument that looks like a saucepan, used to suck water off meteorites. The rest of the room is full of cupboards filled with drawers containing slices of meteorite. Propped up on a cupboard is a painting of the planets, each one studded with jewels. No one really knows who made it or how it ended up in in the lab, but it’s beautiful.

      Brother Guy popped a 4.6-billion-year old meteorite into my hand. This was the oldest in the collection and was found in France in 1810. Lots of locals saw it fall from the sky and then had to convince sceptical scientists that it was space rock. It has a handwritten label attached to it telling how it fell to earth in L’Aigle.

      On the wall is a photograph of the current Pope looking into a microscope at a section of meteorite. Brother Guy showed him two; one found near his hometown in southern Germany; the other one in the Ukraine in 1866. Brother Guy showed me the second slice. He took it out of its drawer and slid it under a microscope that shone polarized light. ‘It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope,’ I said. Brother Guy turned the slide in circles, and bright colours shifted into new patterns. It was bizarre that so many shapes could appear from something that looked so bland and tiny on the slide. ‘All the meteorites do this under polarized light,’ Brother Guy added, ‘but this is the prettiest of them all.’

      Brother Guy made a Christmas card out of an image of the meteorite I was looking at, because he thinks a pattern within it looks like Jesus in a manger. He gave me one of the cards. On the back, it says, ‘The meteorite samples formed in the proto-solar nebula around our sun, 4.56 billion years ago.’

      This card is not your average Christmas card, and not one you’d expect to get from the Vatican, at least, not unless you know about Brother Guy and the two Vatican observatories.

      [Mars canals] Secchi drew some of the first colour illustrations of Mars and referred to the canali, the Italian word for channels, on the surface of the planet. Some nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century astronomers thought ‘canali’ meant ‘canals’ and used them as evidence that there was life on Mars.

      [Three pieces of Mars] The Vatican Observatory owns three pieces of Mars rock, each one from a different part of the planet.

      [Brother Guy J. Consolmagno] Brother Guy was assigned the job of astronomer at the Vatican Observatory when he became a Jesuit. He showed me around the Vatican meteorite collection at the Pope’s summer residence.

      THE ROYAL SOCIETY IN LONDON began in 1660, when a group of scientists decided it would be valuable to meet once a week and discuss experiments. Today it is one of the oldest scientific academies in the world.

      Their archive is split between a salt mine in Cheshire – to access anything down there you have to go in a miner’s lift and put on a hard hat and a basement in its HQ in London.

      I headed downstairs into the basement, which is stuffed with a quarter of a million manuscripts made up of the musings, publications and letters written by some of the greatest scientific minds that have ever lived.

      Mixed in among the books and writings are 200 objects, including slides of a goat with the bends (used when working out dive tables), a wonderful doodle on blotting paper by top scientists and the then prime minister gathered at a meeting about the Transit of Venus in 1882, tag and a wooden potato masher made by a young Ernest Rutherford for ten his grandma. I looked a bit confused. ‘Rutherford,’ said Keith Moore, curator of the Royal Society’s library and archives, ‘split the atom.’ Rutherford is buried in Westminster Abbey, near Sir Isaac Newton.

      Pretty much everyone has heard the story about how Newton first described gravity. He was sitting underneath an apple tree when an apple fell from the tree and bounced off his head. Newton wondered why. His answer? A thing he called gravity. Anyone who has looked deeper into the tale comes up against people saying it wasn’t true.

      But Newton knew the value of a good anecdote and told it himself. In the Royal Society library there is a first-hand account of him describing the event to William Stukeley, author of Memoirs of Newton’s Life (1752):

       After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea [sic], under the shade of some apple trees; only he, and myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre?

      So the apple tree really did inspire Newton, even if the apple didn’t fall on his head. The account is online on the Royal Society’s website if you want to see it.

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