Slashdot Mirror
Pluto Decision Meets with Frustration
fuzzybunny writes "The BBC reports that the IAU's controversial Prague vote on demoting Pluto from planet status was irregular. 'There were 2,700 astronomers in Prague during that 10-day period. But only 10% of them voted this afternoon.'" On a less serious note, lx writes "Nonplussed by Pluto's recent downgrade from Planet Status, Fox News's own John Gibson does an incredible Stephen Colbert impersonation to correct the 'revisionist history' of the IAU's decision. Exemplifying 'truthiness,' from the article: 'Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I?' "
So wait.. let me get this straight. Fox News is trying to copy a show that is a direct parody of the Fox News network? There's got to be some irony in there somewhere.
Why are people so frustrated with this? I typically resist change, but I'm ok with this. If the definition of planet has been refined (that's my understanding) and pluto no longer fits the criteria, then this is fine.
We keep the new definitions, but still call Pluto a planet, just as an honorary title.
Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I?
Because we were wrong. It's orbit is incredibly un-circular, it wildly off the plane of the solar system, and it's smaller than the moon! It never belonged in the pigeon-hole we've labelled "planet".
Part of science is accurate classification. We can't label something just because we want to.
The only thing "incredible" about that "Stephen Colbert impersonation" is how bad it was.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
'Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I?' "
Oh yes dear me, because information never changes and people should not EVAR be required to use their brains after their youthful indoctrination.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
They are astronomers. Any two numbers within an order of magnitude are equal (on an astronomical scale). Thus 472 = 270 = 2,700/10
Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I?
Before five hundred years ago I learned that the Earth was flat and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I?
(2) looks OK, but the IAU folks have taken the (IMHO) insane view that a "dwarf planet" is not a subtype of "planet" at all (contrast "dwarf pine tree" or "dwarf sunflower" or "dwarf hippopotamus", all of which are subtypes of their source nown). That destroys a potential way to finesse the Pluto issue -- by calling it a dwarf planet, they could have let everyone have their semantic cake, and eat it too.
On a different note, another scientist friend of mine just told me his six-year-old daughter burst into tears when she found out Pluto isn't to be considered a planet anymore. :-(
As s20451 points out, this has been a week full of idiotic bullshit. In a week where the JonBenet thing dominates the news, I think griping out Pluto getting a few minutes of coverage on the nightly news is really that much of a disaster.
But unlike the JonBenet crap, this Pluto case actually touches on something that *is* interesting. I didn't RTFA (c'mon, this is slashdot!) but the summary sounds pretty familiar. As stated above, conservatives see this as one more example of how the pinko-commie-liberals are revising history. Conservatives believe strongly in tradition and the status quo and their belief is that change has to be justified. That is, there has to be a damn good reason to change things. This touches on some timely political issues in an indirect and hidden way.
What concerns me, however, is that people consider this some sort of big chore to adjust their thinking that Pluto is no longer a planet. The quote from the summary is a prime example of this. The pundit complains "Hey, I've already done all that learning stuff. You mean I still have to continue to think and learn and possibily be open to new ideas once I'm an adult?" Yeah, I'm paraphrasing but I'm troubled by the idea that so many adults seem to have that learning ends once you're out of school. Think about it: it's really trivial to get it through your skull that Pluto isn't considered a planet anymore. But even this absolutely simple example of relearning draws groans from people who have a national stage to pontificate. What kind of example is this setting for our nation's youth? That it sucks to learn new stuff? That changing your mind in the face of new evidence is a chore that should be resisted and even hotly contested?
Don't think about this news story as the simple redefinition of a celestial body. Look at this story as one more facit in the anti-learning, anti-intellectual course that our country is going down. Then it becomes a lot more "news for nerds, stuff that matters." Does it really matter that Pluto has been downgraded. No, probably not for most of us. But it does matter a hell of a lot that there seems to be this outcry to keep things the way they are simply for the sake of tradition.
GMD
watch this
>
>Oh yes dear me, because information never changes and people should not EVAR be required to >use their brains after their youthful indoctrination.
isn't that what religion is all about - that the "almighty" is absolute and no debate is allowed ?
thank goodness i dont belong to brain-washing propaganda-spewing groups, frequently known as "bible study"
I couldn't agree more. The IAU has the authority to make this decision, but if the OP is correct, and only 10% of the IAU voted, that isn't even a quorum.
Two things really bothered me about this decision, and neither of them are the decision that Pluto is not a planet, but have to do with the way the decision was made.
1) When asked about applying this definition to other stars and their potential planets, the committee that proposed this definition said that the definition on the table only applies to our solar system.
2) One of the delegates said, "We would really look like idiots if we came out of this meeting without some type of decision." (I don't know who to attribute this to, but I heard the scientist's voice on NPR).
Another interesting tidbit is that the original defintion, as suggested by the committee, had the unintended consequence of removeing Neptune from the definition of a planet (it hasn't fully cleared its neighborhood, i.e. Pluto), so they added an addendum to the definition.
My thought is the IAU does look like idiots, for doing 1, and making statement 2. All they have done is muddy the waters again. They haven't come up with a definition that will be applicable to all bodies orbiting any star (even though there are bound to be exceptions). The addendum to make Neptune a planet under this new definition again shows that they really didn't think this through like they should have before submitting the definition.
If they were to act more like scientists than media-coverage hungry people (the "we would look like idiots" comment), they might have actually come up with a definition that didn't need an addendum to include a large gas giant, and one that would be applicable to extra-solar planet hunters...
Another interesting tidbit is that most of the scientists in the "Pluto shouldn't be a planet" camp also had competing missions for which they wanted funding that might instead go toward a Pluto mission of some sort.
Much as I dislike Fox, the guy does have a point - the definition of 'planet' has absolutely no use whatsoever in science. If we are modelling the solar system, we add in objects of large mass, whether they are planets, moons, or asteroids, or whatever, depending on how much sensitivity is required. Stopping Pluto from being a planet makes no difference. Sure, it makes 'planet' more consistent. But no one in the science world truly cares. The facts of the world here in fact have not changed. Only nomenclature has.
The idea of planets is really only meaningful in the political or cultural sphere, since it's more interesting to say that we are going to send man to another planet than to just another random rock. It's also useful in education, because we ask our kids to learn the names of the planets, not every body that orbits the sun. There is really very little useful value in writing new textbooks here.
Guys, it's called science, and science revises itself over time to accomodate new data. Gravitational perturbations of Neptune first led astronomers to seek a ninth planet. When Tombaugh found it in 1930 Pluto was thought to be Earth-sized and similarly massive. Over the decades its size and mass kept getting revised downward as new scientific discoveries were made. The perturbations turned out to not exist-- another example of science refining itself.
Now we've discovered UB313, Sedna, Ixion, Quoar and others, and it's clear that Pluto's only the most prominent representative of the Kuiper belt, just as Ceres is the most prominent member of the asteroid belt. The media that are causing this furor are ignorant of the real issues involved and seem merely interested in running stories about Mrs. Johnson's 3rd grade class being upset about Mickey's dog.
Pluto is still there. It's still the same size and mass it always was, and New Horizons is still going to visit it. But it never would be called a planet if it were discovered today.
I don't get this either - that's from a quote from a Harvard professor who drafted the proposal to increase the number of planets. From somebody from such a background, I'd hope for more accuracy - even if he'd doubled that figure, it'd have been closer (since the actual figure is ~15.7%).
It's also interesting that, out of the two quotes in the article against this decision, one is from somebody leading a mission to Pluto, the other is from somebody who helped draft a proposal to raise the number of planets. Why am I not surprised that they're both against this decision and the vote that led to it?
"It's an awful definition; it's sloppy science and it would never pass peer review - for two reasons." (from the first link) This isn't a scientific decision . . . it is merely a case of semantics and any decision either way is arbitrary. Naming something a planet or not naming it one does not change its properties. The decision to "demote" Pluto was a good one, for the sake of simplicity, otherwise as more Kuiper Belt objects were discovered, the number of planets would increase and increase and be unmanagable.
Except that a cutoff that includes Pluto isn't sane. They might all be arbitrary, but it isn't useful if it's set so low as to be meaningless. The alternative is essentially to freeze the planets as they are because lay-people can't be bothered to remember that Pluto isn't a planet anymore. You're telling me that's less arbitrary than moving the threshold?
Wasn't it? I thought the talk started as so many TNO's were discovered in the Kuiper belt. Where some were almost like Pluto clones too. But maybe you would've rather had these added to our solar system instead. Or maybe you wouldn't want any change at all, proposing a static solar system model and being blind to observations made after 1930 saying e.g. Pluto is pretty much a caught Kuiper belt object. Heck, in the 30's, people hadn't even direct evidence of the Kuiper belt with the first object found in 1992, and you complain about a lack of new data.
A lack of new definition would've left all those TNO's as objects without official definitions and scientists never liked undefined but identified objects, ever.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Words have definitions so that we can easily and accurately convey ideas. I believe the correct term for Pluto is now "dwarf planet."
Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I?
Actually I don't know why Pluto got itself unmade as a planet. I didn't even read the rest of the story, frankly.
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if Stephen Colbert quoted this article, and 'agreed' with his points - it's exactly the sort of thing that'd be brought up on the show.
"It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts"
John Gibson is just pissed off that someones with no accountability to the public decided to redefine 'the facts'.
The only thing that has changed about Pluto is its classification, 'the facts' are still the same.
You'd think someone at Fox News would know that defining 'the facts' is more important than 'the facts'.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
No actually, by allowing Pluto to remain a planet now that the Kuiper belt has been discovered would be changing the previously accepted "definition" of a planet
Ceres was once a "planet" too. Discoverer Father Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801 was looking for a planet in the large gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. A mathematic hypothesis existed at the time that a planet should be there. But Ceres was a planet for only a few months before other asteroid belt objects started being discovered. Ceres lost it's status because way back in 1801 - 1802 astronomers had the notion that a planet doesn't share its orbit with other like sized objects.
Pluto was a "planet" for over 1/2 a century before it was discovered it wasn't a planet, just one of many objects in the Kuiper belt. Unfortunately that was a long enough time for even politicians and Fox news personalities to learn it was a "planet", and god knows those guys can't un-learn anything!
--
Harvey
I was taught the correct pronunciation of Uranus was emphasizing the first syllable.
That naturally doesn't stop the fuckwit tourists cracking asshole jokes everytime they visit the observatory and planetarium where I work.
For some reason they expect me to roll around on the floor laughing, as if it's the first time I've ever heard that one, and they become quite grumpy when I just roll my eyes or stare blankly, or---my personal favorite---completely ignore the comment.
Nobody intelligent sniggers about the name of a planet. If you plan to disagree then it may be time to think a little more about what I just said: "Nobody intelligent sniggers about the name of a planet."
A couple of good points have already been made in subsequent posts, but if I understand it, there were almost 10,000 scientists at this gathering (about 2700 were considered authoritative), and the vote was cast in the 11th hour by a mere 457 scientists with a specialized point of view. I agree that useful standards and definitions ought to be made, but I expect a fair-minded body to have something like 90+% consensus, not just a majority of the voters available.
My favorite definition of politics (verb): "Vying for scarce resources". In many areas of Science the "scarce resource" is fame or prestige. (This may make politics a subset of Economics, rather than the other way around. Don't forget: Fame and prestige also may translate into monetary benefits.) Imposing the dynamic definition instead of the geologic definition may lead to diffrerences in the way Astronomy is conducted and funded. However, I believe that scientific definitions and standards ought to be created for their universal usefulness, not for political gain. And therefore, I believe these definitions and standards ought to be objectively evaluated and agreed upon by consensus of all but the "fringe" in the body of Scientists.
Of course, this is just my opinion.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"