Excerpt:
"The Hyugens part is the probe that will be dropped into the
atmosphere of Titan, for some real close-up work. Now it turns out
that a recipe found in an old book in East Germany was essential to
build an integral part of the Cassini Orbiter. It was a recipe for a
ceramic. [...] Eastern European countries did use ceramics like these
as recently as 10 years ago. Unfortunately, when Germany was unified
in 1990, many of the libraries in East Germany simply threw out old
books, in the belief that the new books they would shortly receive
from the friendly would somehow be "better".
Now Martin Weskott is a Lutheran priest in Katlenburg. He is also
known as the "Book Pastor". Over the last decade, he has personally
saved some 700,000 old books from going to the tip, and he stored them
in an old monastery. Lauche was desperate for information about the
old ceramics, and he knew that if anybody had a book with the needed
knowledge, Weskott would.
The guess paid off. Weskott did have an old book about ceramics, which
did have a recipe for a ceramic that expanded exactly as much as glass
did - and this ceramic was used to build the spectrometer now on
Cassini flying towards Saturn.
So thanks to the foresight of Pastor Weskott, Stone Age knowledge will
take us further into the Space Age."
I am deeply convinced that there is no excusation for destroying
books. A lot of people in Germany were shocked that the University
Library of Eichstätt has destroyed 80 tons of books (around 100.000
volumes) from Bavarian Capuchine libraries.
See the news coverage at
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/3534122/ (in German)
The public prosecutor's office in Ingolstadt has launched a criminal
investigation.