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?' "
He must have a hard time when we elect a new President.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
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.
After the ambush by the Dwarf Planet camp, on the last day, the IAU appears ready to fragment into smaller sub-unions, or dwarf unions.
Meanwhile, astrologers going out of their minds over the contentious issue of what constitutes a planet, how many of them there are and how it will impact births, weddings and divining portents, have finally had enough. This evening Seoul, Mumbai and San Francisco are in flames as astrologers and their clients rampage.
today's lesson: if you don't like the result of the last vote, wait until your opposition has left and then call another vote.
And what's this 472 of 2,700 being 10% stuff?
I want one of those bumper stickers. I mean, how geek!
Ah, here's more info on merchandising the Pluto debate and a place you can vote with your $.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
The BBC reports that the IAU's controversial Prague vote on demoting Pluto from planet status was irregular.
Well then, it sounds like they need more fiber.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
'Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I?'
Don't fret it. Long ago Romans learned it was a god. They didn't have to unlearn it. Their empire simply collapsed.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
We keep the new definitions, but still call Pluto a planet, just as an honorary title.
Much like how the United States still refers to Canada as a soveriegn nation, instead of a 51st state.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
Considering that Pluto orbits both inside and outside of Neptune's more circular orbit, even if on a slant to the ecliptic, what are the chances they could collide someday? Is there a common point both celestial bodies (note how cleverly I've avoided the use of the now obsolete term 'planet') have both passed through at some 4th dimensional offset (time for those of you in Rio Linda) from each other?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Don't worry, Diebold has just announced the results of the recount, and 3,134 of the 2,700 delegates voted to make Pluto stay as a planet.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
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?
Whether Pluto is or is not considered a planet is not as important to me as the integrity of high-level guidance among senior scientists. When the arguments for or against a decision depend on popular vote rather than rational consensus, scientists reduce themselves to the level of lawyers. When the objectivity of scientific thought is bypassed by special interest groups and politics, science is no longer Science. This whole process has been a shameful exhibition of politics.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I usually don't comment much, but when a nationally-recognized news anchor makes stupid comments, I feel obliged.
He says, "All of a sudden Ringo isn't a Beatle? All of a sudden somebody changes a standard and Curly isn't a stooge, or Zeppo isn't a Marx, or Ari isn't one of the "Entourage"? Actually I don't know why Pluto got itself unmade as a planet. I didn't even read the rest of the story, frankly."
My god. Yeah, because Ringo Starr's status as a Beatle hinges on statistics and his orbital ellipse, just like Pluto's. Look out for that 'Two Stooges' DVD also. John Gibson sounds like a prick -- if our understanding of the universe evolved John Gibson's way, we might still be afraid to fall off the edge of the world, or the Sun might still rotate around the Earth. The changing of 'standards' is inevitable as a better understanding of the universe becomes available. The more technologically advanced we become, you can bet laws, theories, and yes, even TEXTBOOK PRINT may become outdated.
(Note: this rant directed toward John Gibson's stupid 'rebuttal,' regardless of the IAU decision whether Pluto should be considered a planet or not.
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
I'll tell you why.
Ever look at the price tag on a Textbook?, those things are expensive.
To pay for the textbook publishers political action committee.
Think of the money that will need to be spent by schools for new science textbooks; just after they got done replacing them to give equal space to 'Intelligent Design'.
You might think it's unimportant, but when the federally mandated standardised test asks how many planets are in the Solar System...
AccountKiller
(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. :-(
Well, I have to rethink my teenage stoned idea that maybe the solar system was a neon atom in a beer sign. Now it's a flourine atom... It's just not as cool.
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
Gibson would've said the converse when they added Pluto:
"I grew up with eight planets. Now some know-nothing radicle tells me there are nine? This 'planet' Pluto is nothing but a rock of ice in space."
We stopped believing that the Earth is flat because better observations and measurements of the Earth contradicted the definition of "flat". However, what they're doing with Pluto is changing the definition of "planet". This is an entirely arbitrary process, and the definition they've come up with is entirely arbitrary. It has much less to do with science than with human psychology.
The people who want to stick with Pluto as a planet are at least as rational and justified in their belief as the people who want to change it.
Look in the 'dead tree file' "Astrophysics with a PC", by Paul Hellings.
Item 4.7.3. "The case of Pluto and Neptune" explains why they will never collide, and gives the source code for implementing the simulation. Sorry, it's in BASIC, but you can easily reimplement it in Perl or Python, or whatever your favourite langage is, it's just one page of code.
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 know of a way to end this debate once and for all, lets blow up pluto
My Very Exotic Mistress Just Showed Up Nude.
Now that's news.
"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.
Seems "My! Very educated morons just screwed up numerous planetariums." would be more appropriate. ;-)
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
9planets.org?
boy are they pissed. time to get a new domain eh?
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
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?
Alright here it is: we build a big "laser" and blast the planet/pluton/dwarf to smithereens. No Pluto = no controversy. All can, and will, be happy then. We can even get it a memorial plaque. It could say something like this:
In memory of Pluto, 1930-2006
Beloved 9th planet of our solar system, dwarf planet, and now intercosmic dust, we will remember you...
As an interesting extension, it could be argued that Neptune has also 'cleared' its orbit. Pluto is locked into a 3:2 orbit with Neptune, and this is fixed by Neptune's gravity. Neptune has forced Pluto into a stable orbit WRT itself, and so has cleared its orbit.
Correct decision, IAU, well done
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The new definition has that a planet is
(a) in orbit around a star or stellar remnants,
(b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape,
(c) is not massive enough to initiate thermonuclear fusion of deuterium in its core, and
(d) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
Where do the problems begin - with a) what happens when we find systems that are orbiting tight binaries - they are not a single star, could satisfy b), c) and d) but wouldn't classify as planets. What about a system with objects satisfying b) c) and d) but around a brown dwarf. A black hole can be a stellar remnant - I'd not call something that satisfies b) c) and d) orbiting a black hole a planet. I'd call it mostly doomed.
b) is terrible and it features in both defintions - an object with a high spin or a large system of moons can be in hydrostatic equilibrium, and can satisfy a) c) and d) but deviate from being spherical by a respectable amount. Atleast here you can define some quantitative deviation from being a sphere. An artifical limit on how spherical an object is stupid because there will be border line systems. You can still kida work with this one atleast.
c) is fine and sensible and corresponds to well defined physical conditions and is the dividing line between brown dwarfs and stars - which makes me wonder what happens to brown dwarfs with this definition.
d) As the BBC article points out the earth hasn't cleared its orbits and there are plenty of NEOs, all the Jovians have moons and rings (if anything these are more in the neighborhood of the planets orbit than asteroids), Jupiter has Trojans and Damocloids. If Pluto crosses Neptunes object last I checked yes Pluto hasn't cleared its object but neither has Neptune. Do you select which one remains a planet on the basis of mass. What if the less massive object was more spherical?
Only a limit based on hydrogen fusion in the core is clean. You can atleast qualify how spherical an object is even if a hard limit above which we call something spherical enough and below not spherical enough is stupid. Since its quantitative its more useful. I don't see any particular reason to limit things to a single star or stellar remnants. This is flaky - make it in orbit around a system thats actively undergoing nuclear fusion or something. Theres just no way to use this neighborhood definition so toss it.
I think the problem here is the IAU is hell bent on saving what we traditionally think of as planets without adding too many.
Sounds vaguely racist
The point is that planets are not that special and there are probably a lot of them out there. The only thing special about this one is that we are in it. Sorry if that seems anthropic. Stars are definetly not special and there are probably a lot of planetary systems out there. If the worry is that we have to change what we have to teach kids and we don't want them to memorize 100 objects then I'd argue that they ought to be learning a consistent defintion of what a planet and a star is instead. If they can name any 10 in our solar system they get ten points and can move on to the next question. Which is can than name a few other planetary systems. I don't think you are going to lose interest in astronomy by not emphasizing the nearest planet - not as long as you can take them to an 8 inch scope even and show you Jupiter's moons and Saturns rings.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
And if other bodies ( such as xena )...
Wow.
That just sparked a minor epiphany. IIRC, Xena was a mortal woman who acquired the power to destroy the Gods. And now her namesake celestial body has demonstrated the similar power of destroying a planet named after one of those Gods, by stirring up a bunch of astronomical hot air many AU from its center of gravity. That's heavy, dude. I mean, isn't it amazing how reality recapitulates fiction?
I think "Xena" should definitely become the official name of this planet-destroying roundish body that orbits about the Sun and is bigger than a breadbox but apparently is pretty friendly with its neighbors.
Of course if the 4% of astronomers who decide such things find that Xena isn't all that tolerant of neighbors, then I guess it will become the nineth planet, eh?
When I read that Pluto was being downgraded to "dwarf planet" status, I thought, "it'll always be Yuggoth to me," and I broke out in song...
(Sing it to the tune of "Always a Woman to Me" by Billy Joel)
They can harp on its size
They can call it a dwarf planet
And they can say that it's wise
To just keep on ignorin' it
They can say it's remote
And just too hard to see
They can talk about Pluto
But it'll always be Yuggoth to me
No, the Mi-Go are far
from concerned what we say to it
Put your head in a jar
And they'll fly you away to it
And you'll learn how to speak
Buzzing just like a bee
Blame it all on Lovecraft
'Cause it'll always be Yuggoth to me
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
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
Now we will all have to relearn the catch jingles we were taught in elementary school to help us memorize the planets.