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Illinois Declares Pluto a Planet
The Bad Astronomer writes "The legislators in Illinois, always on the lookout for more places to find voters, have passed a resolution declaring Pluto is a planet. I'm not sure what else can be said here, except that — besides overstepping their jurisdiction just a wee bit — they make a couple of scientific howlers in the resolution itself."
Why no one trusts them to get things done anymore... We're in the biggest financial crisis in years and they spent the time to declare Pluto a planet. It means nothing, is non binding, and shows a huge disconnect between the political scene and the general populace.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Yeah. I vote that Illinois also changes the definition of a mile and shortens it so that their residents can get more miles to the gallon! I also vote that they cut the definition of an hour down to 30mins to shorten my working day.
Consensus and standards be damned, they're just definitions!
This just proves that fact that politicians are freaking idiots.
If Pluto isn't a planet, it will cost a bunch of money to replace all the fifty year old science texts.
If Pluto is a planet, they can keep using the fifty year old science texts.
What, you think I'm kidding! You obviously aren't a teacher.
The law is written thusly: "that as Pluto passes overhead through Illinois night skies, that it be reestablished with full planetary status"
Because Illinois is a northerly state... does Pluto ever actually pass "overhead"? Ever? Pluto's orbital inclination to the sun is about 11 degrees at maximum. The latitude of Illinois is much higher than that, at about 36 degrees. So Pluto may never pass through their air space, even if the borders of Illinois are extended upwards to infinity.
But since Pluto can never truly be "overhead", does that mean the law never actually goes into effect?
Comments? Suggestions?
who are a bunch of snobbish scients to deny that?
They are, uh, the appropriate scientific institution. They're also, you know, informed?
Say what you like about the IAU defintion, but its a scientific definition made by scientists.
When the powers that be start defining things they aren't properly informed on, in a manner different to the rest of the world, things get pointlessly confused.
If an elected group of people were to decide that within their durestriction, the speed of light in vacuum is 2 * 10^8 m/s, this changes nothing about the state of the world, but is liable to cause significant issues for physicists working in their durestriction, and particularly for cross-durestriction collaborations.
When the 17th Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures defined the speed of light as 299,792,458 m/s in 1983, they were not doing so as elected representatives of the people of Earth, they were doing so as the appropriate scientific institution. This definition clearly didn't change reality in any way, what it did do was give a global definition such that individuals wouldn't use their own favoured definitions and cause inconsistancies when the same calculation is performed by different parties.
Definition of planet, speed of light, I see no real difference here. It doesn't matter how right the definition is, as long as we agree to use it. Consider for instance the average mass of a planet in our solar system. With a standard global definition, this value is simple to agree upon. Without one, you need caveats. If you have caveats for every definition known to man, achieving any consensus quickly becomes a ridiculous process.
The problem with having Pluto being a regular planet not that you have nine planets, it's that you end up with a much larger number of planets as a lot of kuiper belt objects are better matches for planet status than Pluto.
Pluto doesn't look like any of the other planets in other ways, such as having a 'moon' so big that its center of mass isn't inside itself. In fact Charon is 11% of Pluto's mass, and while the Moon (Luna) looks huge, its mass is only 1% of the Earth's.
Just as interesting, Charon doesn't orbit Pluto, making it the only 'planet' with a non-orbiting satellite. Aditionally this satelitte has a mean distance that is less than 20 times Pluto's radius. To put that in perspective, that'd make the Moon orbit at 120,000 km - about a third that of its current orbit. And if we wanted to put it even more into perspective, the Moon would also have to grow significantly to something like 3 times its current size (haven't done the math). While that would be interesting from an astronomical point of view, I'm fairly certain we wouldn't enjoy the increased gravitational pull. If you think high tide is bad now, imagine what it'd be like if the ground itself moved up and down with the tides.
We use definitions, like the word planet, to make things easier. If we can use one definition to describe the planets, and then have to go "oh, and it's okay if they don't lie in the same plane as everything else, as long as they're no more than 50 AU away from the Sun, and have a huge eccentric orbit compared to every other planet", then it doesn't really fit the same definition.
In fact, just looking at orbital eccentricity it'd difficult to argue that Pluto (and Mercury) is in the same class as the other 7 planets. Mercury has a slight excuse since it's 100 times closer to the sun.
But, to jump on your main point:
"declaring that what everyone had said was a planet for the last 80 years is now not one"
That's the thing about science. Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop.
What have we discovered/come to realise in the last 80 years, that we took for granted back then? How about asbestos not being good for you? Smoking not being good for you? That you could in fact go faster than the speed of sound? That DDT isn't the safest way to get rid of bugs?
How about something a bit more down to earth? Like plate tectonics. I mean, if you were to go back in time to the 1930s, when Pluto was discovered, and told people that the earth's surface was made up of large slabs of rock, floating on an inner sea of molten rock, and that these massive plates moved, shifting continents around and that the Earth of today looks nothing like the earth of 100 million years ago, you'd either be comitted to mental 'care', or just outright laughed at.
But, if you prefer sticking to your guns, defending something that we thought was correct 80 years ago, then why not do one better and defend astrology. That's even older.
With Blago, Burris, Todd Stroger's extreme Cook county sales taxes (Chicago for the rest of you), Sheriff Tom Dart suing craigslist...
I'm embarrassed to live here. Passing a "Pluto is a planet" resolution is over the top for this legislature compared with all the other fun stuff going on. It furthers Illinois as a laughing stock, tarnishing the reputation of the state, it's people and businesses.
That is reason enough to get my goat, straw that bropke the camels back per se and make some phone calls and try and remind my representatives to get the bleep on track.