A Short List of Lay Catholic Scientists

Another nail in the coffin of the myth that the Church is anti-science!

From the National Catholic Register

By Angelo Stagnaro

When people say the Church is anti-science, show them this list.

What would you say to someone who insisted Americans never landed on the Moon?

Probably the same thing as you would to someone who insisted that World War II never happened.

Someone who makes outrageous claims that go against logic and historical reality are inevitably spouted by people who think themselves too "knowledgeable" to read books or too "smart" to bother thinking rationally.

There is more truthiness than truth to them.

Everyone is allowed to have their own opinion but no one is allowed to have their own facts. I have no pity for someone who hopes to bully someone and then finds himself in over his head with nothing intelligent to say.

When atheists insist, without the benefit of sanity, sobriety and erudition, that Catholics are somehow "anti-science," I'm quick to force them to listen to a desperately needed lecture as to why they are irretrievably and patently wrong.

My lecture usually does them very little good unless "good" means "infuriating the bigoted atheist in question." But, either way, I've created a chink in their armor through which the Holy Spirit might be able to penetrate. After all, as Martin Luther King, Jr. often reminded us, "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." The Faithful are that thin Catholic line in the sand that the sincerely ignorant and conscientiously stupid, and other enemies of the Church, won't be able to cross.

When fundamentalist atheists insist the Church is anti-science, I lay some knowledge on them. For those unfamiliar with the Church's support and defense of modern science including the incredible accomplishments or lay Catholics, I recommend perusing the following list and its links, which are taken from Wikipedia.

(This is a list of famous lay Catholic scientists and is the second article in the series. For those interested in the first article about famous Catholic cleric-scientists, please follow this link.)

• Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799) – mathematician who wrote on differential and integral calculus
• Georgius Agricola (1494–1555) – father of mineralogy
• André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) – one of the main discoverers of electromagnetism
• Mariano Artigas (1938–2006) – Spanish physicist, philosopher and theologian who received the Templeton Foundation Prize in 1995
• Leopold Auenbrugger (1722–1809) – first to use percussion as a diagnostic technique in medicine
• Adrien Auzout (1622–1691) – astronomer who contributed to the development of the telescopic micrometer
• Amedeo Avogadro (1776–1856) – noted for contributions to molecular theory and Avogadro's Law
• Francisco J. Ayala (1934–present) – Spanish-American biologist and philosopher at the University of California, Irvine]
• Stephen M. Barr (1953–present) – professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware and a member of its Bartol Research Institute
• Laura Bassi (1711–1778) – physicist at the University of Bologna and Chair in experimental physics at the Bologna Institute of Sciences, the first woman to be offered a professorship at a European university
• Antoine César Becquerel (1788–1878) – pioneer in the study of electric and luminescent phenomena
• Henri Becquerel (1852–1908) – awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his co-discovery of radioactivity
• John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) – British pioneer in X-ray crystallography in molecular biology
• Claude Bernard (1813–1878) – physiologist who helped to apply scientific methodology to medicine
• Jacques Philippe Marie Binet (1786–1856) – mathematician known for Binet's formula and his contributions to number theory
• Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862) – physicist who established the reality of meteorites and studied polarization of light
• Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679) – often referred to as the father of modern biomechanics
• Raoul Bott (1923–2005) – mathematician known for numerous basic contributions to geometry in its broad sense]
• Louis Braille (1809–1852) – inventor of the Braille reading and writing system
• Edouard Branly (1844–1940) – inventor and physicist known for his involvement in wireless telegraphy and his invention of the Branly coherer
• James Britten (1846–1924) – botanist, member of the Catholic Truth Society and Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great
• Hermann Brück (1905–2000) – Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1957–1975; honored by Pope John Paul II
• Albert Brudzewski (c. 1445–c.1497) – first to state that the Moon moves in an ellipse
• Nicola Cabibbo (1935-2010): Italian physicist, discoverer of the universality of weak interactions (Cabibbo angle), President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences from 1993 until his death
• Alexis Carrel (1873–1944) – awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for pioneering vascular suturing techniques
• John Casey (mathematician) (1820–1891) – Irish geometer known for Casey's theorem
• Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625–1712) – first to observe four of Saturn's moons and the co-discoverer of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter
• Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857) – mathematician who was an early pioneer in analysis
• Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647) – mathematician known for his work in optics and motion, calculus, and for introducing logarithms to Italy
• Andrea Cesalpino (c.1525–1603) – botanist who also theorized on the circulation of blood
• Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) – published the first translation of the Rosetta Stone
• Guy de Chauliac (c.1300–1368) – the most eminent surgeon of the Middle Ages
• Albert Claude (1899–1983) – awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his contributions to cytology
• Christopher Clavius (1538–1612) – Jesuit who was the main architect of the Gregorian calendar
• Mateo Realdo Colombo (1516–1559) – discovered the pulmonary circuit, ]which paved the way for Harvey's discovery of circulation
• Carl Ferdinand Cori (1896–1984) – shared the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his wife for their discovery of the Cori cycle
• Gerty Cori (1896–1957) – biochemist who was the first American woman win a Nobel Prize in science (1947)
• Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis (1792–1843) – formulated laws regarding rotating systems, which later became known as the Corialis effect
• Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736–1806) – physicist known for developing Coulomb's law
• Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) – first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology
• René Descartes (1596–1650) – father of modern philosophy and analytic geometry
• Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (1805–1859) – mathematicians who contributed to number theory and was one of the first to give the modern formal definition of a function
• Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) – historian of science who made important contributions to hydrodynamics, elasticity, and thermodynamics
• Jean-Baptiste Dumas (1800–1884) – chemist who established new values for the atomic mass of thirty elements
• John Eccles (1903–1997) – Awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on the synapse[16]
• Stephan Endlicher (1804–1849) – botanist who formulated a major system of plant classification
• Gerhard Ertl (1936– ) – German physicist who won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces
• Bartolomeo Eustachi (c.1500–1574) – one of the founders of human anatomy
• Hieronymus Fabricius (1537–1619) – father of embryology
• Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562) – pioneering Italian anatomist who studied the human ear and reproductive organs
• Mary Celine Fasenmyer (1906–1996) – Roman Catholic sister and mathematician, founder of Sister Celine's polynomials
• Hervé Faye (1814–1902) – astronomer whose discovery of the periodic comet 4P/Faye won him the 1844 Lalande Prize and membership in the French Academy of Sciences
• Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) – number theorist who contributed to the early development of calculus
• Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) – awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in induced radioactivity
• Jean Fernel (1497–1558) – physician who introduced the term physiology
• Hippolyte Fizeau (1819–1896) – first person to determine experimentally the velocity of light[18]
• Léon Foucault (1819–1868) – invented the Foucault pendulum to measure the effect of the earth's rotation
• Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) – discovered Fraunhofer lines in the sun's spectrum
• Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827) – made significant contributions to the theory of wave optics
• Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) – father of modern science
• Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) – formulated the theory of animal electricity
• William Gascoigne (1610–1644) – developed the first micrometer
• Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) – French astronomer and mathematician who studied the transit of Mercury and named the aurora borealis
• Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778–1850) – chemist known for two laws related to gases
• Riccardo Giacconi (1931– ) – Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who laid the foundations of X-ray astronomy
• Paula González (1932–present) – Roman Catholic sister and professor of biology
• Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618–1663) – Jesuit who discovered the diffraction of light
• Robert Grosseteste (c.1175–1253) – called "the first man to write down a complete set of steps for performing a scientific experiment"
• Peter Grünberg (1939– ) – German physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics laureate
• Johannes Gutenberg (c.1398–1468) – inventor of the printing press
• Jean Baptiste Julien d'Omalius d'Halloy (1783–1875) – one of the pioneers of modern geology
• John Harsanyi (1929–2000) – Hungarian-American economist and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner
• Eduard Heis (1806–1877) – astronomer who contributed the first true delineation of the Milky Way
• Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644) – founder of pneumatic chemistry
• George de Hevesy (1885–1966) – Hungarian radiochemist and Nobel laureate
• Charles Hermite (1822–1901) – mathematician who did research on number theory, quadratic forms, elliptic functions, and algebra
• John Philip Holland (1840–1914) – developed the first submarine to be formally commissioned by the US Navy
• Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (1748–1836) – first to propose a natural classification of flowering plants
• Mary Kenneth Keller (c.1914–1985) – Sister of Charity and first American woman to earn a PhD in computer science, helped develop BASIC
• Eusebio Kino (1645–1711) – Jesuit missionary and cartographer who drew maps based on his explorations, first showing that California was not an island as was then believed
• Athanasius Kircher (c.1601–1680) – Jesuit scholar, has been called "the last Renaissance man"
• Brian Kobilka (1955– ) – American Nobel Prize winning professor who teaches at Stanford University School of Medicine
• Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (1713–1762) – French astronomer noted for cataloguing stars, nebulous objects, and constellations
• René Laennec (1781–1826) – physician who invented the stethoscope
• Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813) – mathematician and astronomer known for Lagrangian points and Lagrangian mechanics
• Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) – French naturalist, biologist and academic whose theories on evolution preceded those of Darwin
• Johann von Lamont (1805–1879) – astronomer and physicist who studied the magnetism of the Earth and was the first to calculate the mass of Uranus
• Karl Landsteiner (1868–1943) – Nobel Prize winner who identified and classified the human blood types
• Pierre André Latreille (1762–1833) – pioneer in entomology
• Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) – father of modern chemistry
• Jérôme Lejeune (1926–1994) – pediatrician and geneticist, best known for his discovery of the link of diseases to chromosome abnormalities
• Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) – father of comparative physiology
• Étienne-Louis Malus (1775–1812) – discovered the polarization of light
• Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714–1774) – anatomist and anatomical wax artist who lectured at the University of Bologna
• Giovanni Manzolini (1700–1755) – anatomical wax artist and Professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna
• Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) – father of wireless technology and radio transmission
• Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) – known for the Maupertuis principle and for being the first president of the Berlin Academy of Science
• Michele Mercati (1541–1593) – one of the first to recognize prehistoric stone tools as man-made
• Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) – father of acoustics and mathematician for whom Mersenne primes are named
• Charles W. Misner (1932–present) – American cosmologist dedicated to the study of general relativity
• Kenneth R. Miller (1948–present) – American cell biologist and molecular biologist who teaches at Brown University
• Mario J. Molina (1943–present) – Mexican chemist, one of the precursors to the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole (1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry)
• Peter Joseph Moloney (1891–1989) – Canadian immunologist and pioneering vaccine researcher, who worked out the first large-scale purification of insulin in 1922; International Gairdner Award, 1967)
• Gaspard Monge (1746–1818) – father of descriptive geometry
• John J. Montgomery (1858–1911) – American physicist and inventor of gliders and aerodynamics
• Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682–1771) – father of modern anatomical pathology
• Johannes Peter Müller (1801–1858) – founder of modern physiology
• Joseph Murray (1919–2012) – Nobel Prize in Medicine laureate
• John von Neumann (1903–1957) – Hungarian-born American mathematician and polymath who converted to Catholicism
• Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700–1770) – discovered the phenomenon of osmosis in natural membranes
• Martin Nowak (1965-present) – evolutionary theorist and Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University.
• William of Ockham (c.1288–c.1348) – Franciscan friar known for Ockham's Razor
• Nicole Oresme (c.1320–1382) – 14th-century bishop who theorized the daily rotation of the earth on its axis
• Barnaba Oriani (1752–1832) – known for Oriani's theorem and for his research on Uranus
• Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598) – created the first modern atlas and theorized on continental drift
• Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) – French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and philosopher
• Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) – father of bacteriology
• Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) – discovered the Orion Nebula
• Max Perutz (1914–2002) – Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry
• Georg von Peuerbach (1423–1461) – called the father of mathematical and observational astronomy in the West[41]
• John Polanyi (1929– ) – Canadian chemist, won the 1986 Nobel Prize for his research in chemical kinetics[43]
• Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) – Hungarian polymath, made contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy
• Vladimir Prelog (1906–1998) – Croatian-Swiss organic chemist, winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize for chemistry
• Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) – awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions to neuroscience
• René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757) – scientific polymath known especially for his study of insects
• Francesco Redi (1626–1697) – his experiments with maggots were a major step in overturning the idea of spontaneous generation
• Henri Victor Regnault (1810–1878) – chemist with two laws governing the specific heat of gases named after him[44]
• Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro (1853–1925) – one of the founders of tensor calculus
• Gilles de Roberval (1602–1675) – mathematician who studied the geometry of infinitesimals and was one of the founders of kinematic geometry
• Frederick Rossini (1899–1990) – Priestley Medal and Laetare Medal-winning chemist
• Theodor Schwann (1810–1882) – founder of the theory of the cellular structure of animal organisms
• Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865) – early pioneer of antiseptic procedures, discoverer of the cause of puerperal fever
• Louis Jacques Thénard (1777–1857) – discovered hydrogen peroxide
• Theodoric of Freiberg (c.1250–c.1310) – gave the first geometrical analysis of the rainbow
• Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647) – inventor of the barometer
• Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1397–1482) – Italian mathematician, astronomer and cosmographer
• Richard Towneley (1629–1707) – mathematician and astronomer whose work contributed to the formulation of Boyle's Law
• Louis René Tulasne (1815–1885) – biologist with several genera and species of fungi named after him
• Louis Nicolas Vauquelin (1763–1829) – discovered the chemical element beryllium
• Pierre Vernier (1580–1637) – mathematician who invented the Vernier scale
• Urbain Le Verrier (1811–1877) – mathematician who predicted the discovery of Neptune
• Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) – father of modern human anatomy
• François Viète (1540–1603) – father of modern algebra
• Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) – Renaissance anatomist, scientist, mathematician and painter
• Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703) – mathematician known for Viviani's theorem, Viviani's curve and his work in determining the speed of sound
• Alessandro Volta (1f745–1827) – physicist known for the invention of the battery
• Wilhelm Heinrich Waagen (1841–1900) – geologist and paleontologist
• Karl Weierstrass (1815–1897) – often called the father of modern analysis
• E. T. Whittaker (1873–1956) – English mathematician who made contributions to applied mathematics and mathematical physics
• Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) – one of the founders of scientific archaeology
• Bertram Windle (1858–1929) – anthropologist, physician, and former president of University College Cork
• Antonino Zichichi (1929– ) – Italian nuclear physicist, former President of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare