Emendata

Explains how this student organization was born and grow till it became an authoritative library.

And the relevance it had had in Guy Consolmagno and others’ life.

For those of us who never heard the name, Brother Guy Consolmagno is an American research astronomer and Director of the Vatican Observatory, who happens to have an asteroid named after him.

Williams tell us haw in his youth, Consolmagno, after finishing his studies at the Boston College, decided to transfer to MIT, not for the university prestige in astronomic science but for a much more profound attraction.

It wasn’t until 1960s when the library gained its own space in the student center that things began to take shape.

By 1965 the library counted with a decent little budget.

One member —of the many that had dedicated their time— created a catalog based on IBM punch cards known as Pinkdex, which still exist and is now online.

Managed only by MIT’s students and volunteers, Williams’s article alleges that MITSFS boasts the largest open-shelf science fiction library in existence, with books line the walls, mostly floor to ceiling, and numbers that goes back to the 1920s, at the very beginning of the genre.

Since this books had bring to live many realities far before science itself, exploring the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations would have in mankind, turning the improbable into a possible.

The MIT seems the logic place where to find this library, one that has played an important role in the development of so many students and their careers.

As an example of this influence, Williams describes the case of Consolmagno itself, who found the inspiration for his first paper in the journal Science —about the sulfuric volcanoes of Jupiter’s moon lo— on Hal Clement’s book: Iceworld.