Oh and now I RTFA and it turns out Mars-3 was actually all 3: an orbiter for communication, a stationary lander, and a tiny little rover that was tethered to the lander.
10% accuracy is useful if their are less than 10 results? Like, in case you want to make this 8-number lottery more exciting by reducing your chances? Actually, that's brilliant. The 8-number lottery wouldn't pay out well, but it'd be so cheap everyone would enter just for the fleeting feeling of winning something... They might even go so far as to reduce their own chances to make it more of a rush when they win. We'll be rich.
Gravity takes into account rest mass, photons don't have rest mass. You also mean protons have less gravity than what their whole mass would imply, right?
Gravity takes into account rest mass in that rest mass is a form of energy and gravity is proportional to energy. Gravity is not solely due to rest mass, it is due to all forms of energy.
So I meant what I said: Protons have exactly as much gravity as their "whole" mass as in relativistic mass, as in energy, would imply, which is much more than just their rest mass energy. Photons also have gravity in proportion to their energy.
Technically it would have to be read as only the hottest in the hundred or so years we have records for. But it was written such that most people will read it with the meaning of 'hottest evar'
The context of "on record" was clearly established. The only part of the context that changed -- from hottest year in the U.S. to hottest years for the whole planet -- was also clearly established. Most people do not have goldfish brains and can keep track of this context for six whole words.
So, only people who wanted to invent a reason to complain would read it that way. Everyone else knows that the author did not suddenly, mid-sentence, despite already qualifying their claims with "on record", expand the context to the entire history of our rock ball which was at one point molten.
No, "for the entire planet" means in contrast to specific parts of the planet which have not necessarily had their warmest years since 1998, as in global average temperature. Repeating "on record" every single time once the context has already been established would be bad writing.
Just because it is possible for you to deliberately smash the language centers of your brain that normally work just fine so as to manage to misunderstand perfectly clear English does not make it the writer's problem.
Yes, it's perfectly clear that the "on record" qualifier still applies to the immediately appended parenthetical about the 13 warmest years, goldfish brain.
That's a very good point. I have been focused on collision energy when lamenting the loss of the SSC and what physics we could be working on now if the problems the LHC will solve were already history... But I had no idea the luminosity of the SSC was going to be much lower than LHC. That changes my perspective. Thanks!
Oh, I should mention that virtual particles are part of Perturbation Theory, which is a particular mathematical treatment of Quantum Field Theory. The one where you can use Feynman Diagrams to figure out what you're actually supposed to be calculating.
What's interesting is that in Perturbation Theory, virtual particles are allowed to actually violate Conservation laws briefly so long as it falls below the Uncertainty Principle limit (so the Universe can never knows it happened).
In non-perturbation theories of QFT there are no virtual particles and conservation laws are upheld at all points in time.
As long as we're explaining physics principles to those who aren't familiar with them, let's be clear on our terminology and make sure not to create false implications in their minds.
There are two meanings of the word "mass" in special relativity: relativistic mass and intrinsic or rest mass.
Photons have relativistic mass. Relativistic mass is equivalent to energy. The m in E=mc^2 is relativistic mass. Set c = 1 and you have E = m. It's not a conversion, it's an equivalence. Systems with more energy have more relativistic mass, which is what we are measuring on a scale.
Photons do not have intrinsic mass or rest mass. Intrinsic mass is the m0 in E^2 = (m0*c^2)^2 + (pc)^2. m0 is the quantity that is due to the Higgs field potential.
m0 != m.
Now back to the statement "photons do not have mass" -- this statement is correct, with the caveat that you understand it to be talking about rest mass. And because physicists have completely internalized the concept behind E=mc^2, that mass as we normally think of it and energy are the same thing, they never talk about relativistic mass and instead simply call it "energy".
But this is confusing for the layman -- our everyday notion of "mass" is the relativistic mass, not rest mass, even if people don't realize it. The vast majority of the mass in "normal" matter does not come from the rest mass of particles due to the Higgs, but from the binding energy in nucleons from the Strong Nuclear Force.
So photons have mass in the same sense that protons have much more mass than their constituent quark's rest mass. Photons have gravity, just like protons have gravity far in excess of what their rest mass alone would imply.
Once people have had their mind blown, and understand the distinction between relativistic and intrinsic mass, and how the relativistic mass is the same thing as energy so we pretty much always mean "rest mass" when talking about "mass" because otherwise we say "energy", then "photons have no mass" can be processed without confusion.
What his answer describes is why it's so hard to create a free Higgs Boson that we can observe in our detectors through its decay paths. The missing part of the answer, the gist of your question, is what about all the Higgs Bosons that are busy giving rest mass to the detector and everything else in the universe? The answer is that those bosons are, by necessity, virtual ones where "virtual" means "unobservable".
I'm going to switch gears to something I know about but where the same principle applies: Electromagnetism and photons. Photons are a type of boson, similar to the higgs but massless, and they mediate the electromagnetic interaction.
When two charged particles interact, they do so by exchanging a photon. This transfers momentum creating the repulsive force between electrons. In this interaction, the photon's world line begins at one electron and ends at the other. That's its whole existence. So you can't intercept it in the middle -- if you could that would mean the electrons hadn't interacted in the first place, and you had blocked the EM interaction (like with the Faraday Cage he mentioned). This is why you can't see the photons flying back and forth between the plates of a capacitor. Those photons are unobservable, or virtual.
Now in addition to these electrostatic interactions creating virtual photons, you can disturb the EM field and create a 'real' photon, one which can be observed. Because photons are mass-less and have energy based solely on the wavelength which can be arbitrarily long, they can be created very easily. Even exceedingly cold objects emit real photons from the excitation of charged particles inside them.
The Higgs Boson, on the other hand, is massive object so to create a real one suffers from the problems Dr. Organtini describes.
No, you're wrong on the first count. They absolutely should do what they like with it.
No, they should not do whatever they like with it irrespective of what "what they like" is. If "what they like" is shitty, they should re-evaluate their likes and dislikes and do something else. "Can" and "should" have never and will never be equivalent.
Which is actually the same count as the second one, that they should be open to criticism. Criticizing what someone does without simultaneously suggesting they should not have done it is nonsensical.
The only way these two things would be different is if we're confusing "should not have" with "should have been prevented from" which would be a mistake.
I tailored my language to the post I was replying to, but I am surely chagrined knowing someone with such a mature view of what adulthood means doesn't approve.
Yeah, it was so much better when the people could only contribute their money in return for a trinket that had first been vetted and approved by the owning class.
Heaven forbid we take one step closer to the capitalist ideal that if there's public demand for something then that something will be produced to fill that demand. What we really meant was that something will be produced if and only if it is approved by the Gatekeepers of Capitalism.
Saying a dwarf planet is not a planet is as logic as saying a brown dwarf star is not a star, most people will think you're crazy and beat you with spoons.
There's no such thing as a "brown dwarf star". They're just called "brown dwarfs".
"Dwarf planet" not being a "planet" is linguistically odd but nothing that should confuse anyone familiar with the role of adjectives. Vice Presidents are not Presidents and nobody gets beaten with spoons over that.
However that linguistic oddness is the best criticism of the IAU definition I've seen, and I would be quite happy to use a different adjective for "planet" such as "full planet", "primary planet", "uber planet" or what have you.
To say it "never was a planet" is not quite true. It never was a planet according to the definition of planet that we use now, but it was a planet according to the definition we used to use.
No, Pluto was not a planet based on the definition we used to use, and the data we have now.
It is because of this old definition that Ceres is not called a planet -- or it was, until we discovered hundreds of other objects in its orbit. If we had discovered all the TNOs and KBOs at the same time we discovered Pluto, we never would have called it a planet.
The issue here has very little to do with our knowledge of reality changing (it didn't really), but with the way we look at that reality changing (i.e. the words used for a thing).
This is simply not factual. Our knowledge of reality changing is exactly what caused this re-evaluation. In fact, without this new knowledge, then the new IAU definition would not have changed Pluto's status at all.
Changing classifications based on new data is science.
So somewhat contrary to your point, a large part of the reason Pluto isn't called a planet anymore is actually tradition: because we don't want to call all the Kuiper belt objects planets also.
Yes, it's a combination of the traditional (but informal) definition of planet, combined with new information.
Astronomers do run lots of mathematical models, of course, but calling this an "experiment" is stretching the concept past the breaking point.
No, but running a model to see what the theory predicts, then making observations to see if that prediction is borne out in reality, is what I'd call an experiment. How else do you know if an experiment confirms or refutes your hypothesis than by figuring out what the implications of the hypothesis is?
What somebody chooses to call it doesn't actually change what it is.
Exactly. I don't understand why people get upset that Pluto is called something different now. It's the same object before and after the name change. If you thought it was cool before, you should think it was cool after. That's how I think of it.
It's like if you think Saber-Tooth Tigers are awesome (and you should), learning that Smilodon was not actually a tiger or tiger ancestor shouldn't change that one bit. They're still bad-ass prehistoric cats with giant fangs.
Then again, if part of what you thought was cool about Pluto was that it was a unique oddball planet (eccentric orbit, steep inclination), then discovering that it is actually just one of the biggest of many thousands of objects with similar orbital characteristics might be disappointing. This is, once again, irrespective of the definition (even though this discovery is what prompted the change).
This thread is probably not a good place to try to settle an argument by an appeal to some definition of celestial objects that was made by committee. Just saying.
Using an incorrect description of the properties of brown dwarf "stars" as precedent for Jupiter undergoing sustained fusion, when the essence of a brown dwarf is that it is not to our knowledge capable of sustained fusion, is always wrong regardless of time or place.
So is converting "not to our knowledge" to "therefore maybe" (okay so far as far as it goes) to "therefore brown dwarves are a precedent for sustained fusion in Jupiter".
This is an excellent demonstration of the relationship between definitions and properties of objects defined, and how finding a problem with a definition does not allow you to invent arbitrary properties for the object being defined.
Whatever you may choose to call Jupiter, its activity in the radio part of the spectrum and its electromagnetic field cannot be explained by gravitation forces without introducing a whole mess of weird conjectures that do not belong in science. There is something happening within Jupiter, producing quite a bit of energy, that we do not understand
Gravitational binding energy in this context means the conversion of gravitational potential energy into other forms as the object collapses. It would not be expected to be exhibited as 'gravitational forces', and so obviously this would not preclude gravitational binding energy as the source of energy for observed phenomenon. It is not the case that Jupiter is clearly "producing" additional energy beyond this.
Back to language: in an ideal world *all* astronomers would be involved in doing astronomy, and not *some* involved instead in making up taxonomies (classification schemes) by committee.
They're the same astronomers, just so you know. girlintraining made the same ignorant slander, starting with the belief that what they decided was wrong, and extrapolating backward to the false belief that the IAU astronomers are not like "real" astronomers doing useful work.
The IAU on the other hand is drawing up the lines between different classification bins based on what seems logical at this moment, but that is not the empiricism of science.
Changing classifications based on updated observation is exactly the empiricism of science. Going "I don't care what new observations have been made, Pluto should be a planet!" is the opposite.
Stick with empiiricism.
Yes, stick with empiricism, rather than your nostalgic feelings that don't take into account 1) the informal yet common classification scheme that separated planets from asteroids since the 1800s and 2) the new empirical data that suggests Pluto's role in the solar system is very different than what it was thought to be.
The only change the IAU made as far as the taxonomic class "planet" is taking an informal definition and making it formal. The definition itself would have had zero change on the elements in the set "planet" had it not been for new empirical data.
It is worse than wrong, for it hinders efforts to actually do science and collect some real data.
This is just utter nonsense. It is only in the public's mind that Pluto's new classification would make it a less interesting object for study. In real science this is not the case. Not only is Pluto being studied more than ever, so are other dwarf planets and even objects that were and still are classified as "mere" asteroids. "Real data" on Pluto's role as a tiny part of a larger belt of objects continues to pour in.
Ignore this data and calling it "empiricism" is hilarious.
Be willing to accept that not only do you personally not know everything, those whom you place in high authority do not know everything, either.
Jupiter may already be burning; if there was a self-sustaining nuclear reaction at its core, that would explain some of its puzzling activity.
That would cause many more problems (particularly in nuclear theory) than it solves. Jupiter's heat output is easily explained by gravitational binding energy.
The idea of brown dwarf stars is not a new one: stars that do not emit much if any visible light, but pump out heat and particles.
"Brown dwarf star" is not a thing. Brown Dwarves are by definition sub-stellar objects. They are not massive enough to sustain fusion reactions. The current definition puts the minimum mass much higher than Jupiter, though the boundary between brown dwarf and large planet is a fuzzy one. The boundary between brown dwarf and star, however, is much less so.
Not compared to Texas. (But then few sovereigns are. Texas outsizes many European countries.)
This is where an Alaskan steps in to point out you could comfortably fit two Texases into Alaska.
But in all honesty, Michigan isn't really that big for a state either. Sure there's plenty smaller, but when I think "big states" my native land doesn't even enter my mind. Moving to Texas just really put it into perspective.
Speaking of which: Is there any talk of Texas ever exercising its treaty option to break up into five states and get eight more senators?
No, I think that would be unconscionable. Become multiple smaller states? That'd be like breeding a Pigmy Longhorn steer -- the antithesis of Texas mindset. All they talk about is seccession (which they also claim to have the right to do, but we know how that goes).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh and now I RTFA and it turns out Mars-3 was actually all 3: an orbiter for communication, a stationary lander, and a tiny little rover that was tethered to the lander.
Aren't they all (sattelites too) probes? I thought the difference was lander vs rover (vs orbiter).
10% accuracy is useful if their are less than 10 results? Like, in case you want to make this 8-number lottery more exciting by reducing your chances? Actually, that's brilliant. The 8-number lottery wouldn't pay out well, but it'd be so cheap everyone would enter just for the fleeting feeling of winning something... They might even go so far as to reduce their own chances to make it more of a rush when they win. We'll be rich.
All of the observations will be of Cowboy Neal.
The voting is just on where to send him first.
Gravity takes into account rest mass, photons don't have rest mass. You also mean protons have less gravity than what their whole mass would imply, right?
Gravity takes into account rest mass in that rest mass is a form of energy and gravity is proportional to energy. Gravity is not solely due to rest mass, it is due to all forms of energy.
So I meant what I said: Protons have exactly as much gravity as their "whole" mass as in relativistic mass, as in energy, would imply, which is much more than just their rest mass energy. Photons also have gravity in proportion to their energy.
Technically it would have to be read as only the hottest in the hundred or so years we have records for. But it was written such that most people will read it with the meaning of 'hottest evar'
The context of "on record" was clearly established. The only part of the context that changed -- from hottest year in the U.S. to hottest years for the whole planet -- was also clearly established. Most people do not have goldfish brains and can keep track of this context for six whole words.
So, only people who wanted to invent a reason to complain would read it that way. Everyone else knows that the author did not suddenly, mid-sentence, despite already qualifying their claims with "on record", expand the context to the entire history of our rock ball which was at one point molten.
No, "for the entire planet" means in contrast to specific parts of the planet which have not necessarily had their warmest years since 1998, as in global average temperature. Repeating "on record" every single time once the context has already been established would be bad writing.
Just because it is possible for you to deliberately smash the language centers of your brain that normally work just fine so as to manage to misunderstand perfectly clear English does not make it the writer's problem.
Yes, it's perfectly clear that the "on record" qualifier still applies to the immediately appended parenthetical about the 13 warmest years, goldfish brain.
That's a very good point. I have been focused on collision energy when lamenting the loss of the SSC and what physics we could be working on now if the problems the LHC will solve were already history... But I had no idea the luminosity of the SSC was going to be much lower than LHC. That changes my perspective. Thanks!
Oh, I should mention that virtual particles are part of Perturbation Theory, which is a particular mathematical treatment of Quantum Field Theory. The one where you can use Feynman Diagrams to figure out what you're actually supposed to be calculating.
What's interesting is that in Perturbation Theory, virtual particles are allowed to actually violate Conservation laws briefly so long as it falls below the Uncertainty Principle limit (so the Universe can never knows it happened).
In non-perturbation theories of QFT there are no virtual particles and conservation laws are upheld at all points in time.
As long as we're explaining physics principles to those who aren't familiar with them, let's be clear on our terminology and make sure not to create false implications in their minds.
There are two meanings of the word "mass" in special relativity: relativistic mass and intrinsic or rest mass.
Photons have relativistic mass. Relativistic mass is equivalent to energy. The m in E=mc^2 is relativistic mass. Set c = 1 and you have E = m. It's not a conversion, it's an equivalence. Systems with more energy have more relativistic mass, which is what we are measuring on a scale.
Photons do not have intrinsic mass or rest mass. Intrinsic mass is the m0 in E^2 = (m0*c^2)^2 + (pc)^2. m0 is the quantity that is due to the Higgs field potential.
m0 != m.
Now back to the statement "photons do not have mass" -- this statement is correct, with the caveat that you understand it to be talking about rest mass. And because physicists have completely internalized the concept behind E=mc^2, that mass as we normally think of it and energy are the same thing, they never talk about relativistic mass and instead simply call it "energy".
But this is confusing for the layman -- our everyday notion of "mass" is the relativistic mass, not rest mass, even if people don't realize it. The vast majority of the mass in "normal" matter does not come from the rest mass of particles due to the Higgs, but from the binding energy in nucleons from the Strong Nuclear Force.
So photons have mass in the same sense that protons have much more mass than their constituent quark's rest mass. Photons have gravity, just like protons have gravity far in excess of what their rest mass alone would imply.
Once people have had their mind blown, and understand the distinction between relativistic and intrinsic mass, and how the relativistic mass is the same thing as energy so we pretty much always mean "rest mass" when talking about "mass" because otherwise we say "energy", then "photons have no mass" can be processed without confusion.
What his answer describes is why it's so hard to create a free Higgs Boson that we can observe in our detectors through its decay paths. The missing part of the answer, the gist of your question, is what about all the Higgs Bosons that are busy giving rest mass to the detector and everything else in the universe? The answer is that those bosons are, by necessity, virtual ones where "virtual" means "unobservable".
I'm going to switch gears to something I know about but where the same principle applies: Electromagnetism and photons. Photons are a type of boson, similar to the higgs but massless, and they mediate the electromagnetic interaction.
When two charged particles interact, they do so by exchanging a photon. This transfers momentum creating the repulsive force between electrons. In this interaction, the photon's world line begins at one electron and ends at the other. That's its whole existence. So you can't intercept it in the middle -- if you could that would mean the electrons hadn't interacted in the first place, and you had blocked the EM interaction (like with the Faraday Cage he mentioned). This is why you can't see the photons flying back and forth between the plates of a capacitor. Those photons are unobservable, or virtual.
Now in addition to these electrostatic interactions creating virtual photons, you can disturb the EM field and create a 'real' photon, one which can be observed. Because photons are mass-less and have energy based solely on the wavelength which can be arbitrarily long, they can be created very easily. Even exceedingly cold objects emit real photons from the excitation of charged particles inside them.
The Higgs Boson, on the other hand, is massive object so to create a real one suffers from the problems Dr. Organtini describes.
No, you're wrong on the first count. They absolutely should do what they like with it.
No, they should not do whatever they like with it irrespective of what "what they like" is. If "what they like" is shitty, they should re-evaluate their likes and dislikes and do something else. "Can" and "should" have never and will never be equivalent.
Which is actually the same count as the second one, that they should be open to criticism. Criticizing what someone does without simultaneously suggesting they should not have done it is nonsensical.
The only way these two things would be different is if we're confusing "should not have" with "should have been prevented from" which would be a mistake.
Thanks! I was wondering how they found me out at the 4th grade science fair.
Not being able to criticize a quote other than that its source is wikipedia shows you have no knowledge at all.
Rule 34 of Acquisition -- You can profit from porn of it, no exceptions?
I tailored my language to the post I was replying to, but I am surely chagrined knowing someone with such a mature view of what adulthood means doesn't approve.
Yeah, it was so much better when the people could only contribute their money in return for a trinket that had first been vetted and approved by the owning class.
Heaven forbid we take one step closer to the capitalist ideal that if there's public demand for something then that something will be produced to fill that demand. What we really meant was that something will be produced if and only if it is approved by the Gatekeepers of Capitalism.
Saying a dwarf planet is not a planet is as logic as saying a brown dwarf star is not a star, most people will think you're crazy and beat you with spoons.
There's no such thing as a "brown dwarf star". They're just called "brown dwarfs".
"Dwarf planet" not being a "planet" is linguistically odd but nothing that should confuse anyone familiar with the role of adjectives. Vice Presidents are not Presidents and nobody gets beaten with spoons over that.
However that linguistic oddness is the best criticism of the IAU definition I've seen, and I would be quite happy to use a different adjective for "planet" such as "full planet", "primary planet", "uber planet" or what have you.
To say it "never was a planet" is not quite true. It never was a planet according to the definition of planet that we use now, but it was a planet according to the definition we used to use.
No, Pluto was not a planet based on the definition we used to use, and the data we have now.
It is because of this old definition that Ceres is not called a planet -- or it was, until we discovered hundreds of other objects in its orbit. If we had discovered all the TNOs and KBOs at the same time we discovered Pluto, we never would have called it a planet.
The issue here has very little to do with our knowledge of reality changing (it didn't really), but with the way we look at that reality changing (i.e. the words used for a thing).
This is simply not factual. Our knowledge of reality changing is exactly what caused this re-evaluation. In fact, without this new knowledge, then the new IAU definition would not have changed Pluto's status at all.
Changing classifications based on new data is science.
So somewhat contrary to your point, a large part of the reason Pluto isn't called a planet anymore is actually tradition: because we don't want to call all the Kuiper belt objects planets also.
Yes, it's a combination of the traditional (but informal) definition of planet, combined with new information.
Astronomers do run lots of mathematical models, of course, but calling this an "experiment" is stretching the concept past the breaking point.
No, but running a model to see what the theory predicts, then making observations to see if that prediction is borne out in reality, is what I'd call an experiment. How else do you know if an experiment confirms or refutes your hypothesis than by figuring out what the implications of the hypothesis is?
What somebody chooses to call it doesn't actually change what it is.
Exactly. I don't understand why people get upset that Pluto is called something different now. It's the same object before and after the name change. If you thought it was cool before, you should think it was cool after. That's how I think of it.
It's like if you think Saber-Tooth Tigers are awesome (and you should), learning that Smilodon was not actually a tiger or tiger ancestor shouldn't change that one bit. They're still bad-ass prehistoric cats with giant fangs.
Then again, if part of what you thought was cool about Pluto was that it was a unique oddball planet (eccentric orbit, steep inclination), then discovering that it is actually just one of the biggest of many thousands of objects with similar orbital characteristics might be disappointing. This is, once again, irrespective of the definition (even though this discovery is what prompted the change).
This thread is probably not a good place to try to settle an argument by an appeal to some definition of celestial objects that was made by committee. Just saying.
Using an incorrect description of the properties of brown dwarf "stars" as precedent for Jupiter undergoing sustained fusion, when the essence of a brown dwarf is that it is not to our knowledge capable of sustained fusion, is always wrong regardless of time or place.
So is converting "not to our knowledge" to "therefore maybe" (okay so far as far as it goes) to "therefore brown dwarves are a precedent for sustained fusion in Jupiter".
This is an excellent demonstration of the relationship between definitions and properties of objects defined, and how finding a problem with a definition does not allow you to invent arbitrary properties for the object being defined.
Whatever you may choose to call Jupiter, its activity in the radio part of the spectrum and its electromagnetic field cannot be explained by gravitation forces without introducing a whole mess of weird conjectures that do not belong in science. There is something happening within Jupiter, producing quite a bit of energy, that we do not understand
Gravitational binding energy in this context means the conversion of gravitational potential energy into other forms as the object collapses. It would not be expected to be exhibited as 'gravitational forces', and so obviously this would not preclude gravitational binding energy as the source of energy for observed phenomenon. It is not the case that Jupiter is clearly "producing" additional energy beyond this.
Back to language: in an ideal world *all* astronomers would be involved in doing astronomy, and not *some* involved instead in making up taxonomies (classification schemes) by committee.
They're the same astronomers, just so you know. girlintraining made the same ignorant slander, starting with the belief that what they decided was wrong, and extrapolating backward to the false belief that the IAU astronomers are not like "real" astronomers doing useful work.
The IAU on the other hand is drawing up the lines between different classification bins based on what seems logical at this moment, but that is not the empiricism of science.
Changing classifications based on updated observation is exactly the empiricism of science. Going "I don't care what new observations have been made, Pluto should be a planet!" is the opposite.
Stick with empiiricism.
Yes, stick with empiricism, rather than your nostalgic feelings that don't take into account 1) the informal yet common classification scheme that separated planets from asteroids since the 1800s and 2) the new empirical data that suggests Pluto's role in the solar system is very different than what it was thought to be.
The only change the IAU made as far as the taxonomic class "planet" is taking an informal definition and making it formal. The definition itself would have had zero change on the elements in the set "planet" had it not been for new empirical data.
It is worse than wrong, for it hinders efforts to actually do science and collect some real data.
This is just utter nonsense. It is only in the public's mind that Pluto's new classification would make it a less interesting object for study. In real science this is not the case. Not only is Pluto being studied more than ever, so are other dwarf planets and even objects that were and still are classified as "mere" asteroids. "Real data" on Pluto's role as a tiny part of a larger belt of objects continues to pour in.
Ignore this data and calling it "empiricism" is hilarious.
Be willing to accept that not only do you personally not know everything, those whom you place in high authority do not know everything, either.
Jupiter may already be burning; if there was a self-sustaining nuclear reaction at its core, that would explain some of its puzzling activity.
That would cause many more problems (particularly in nuclear theory) than it solves. Jupiter's heat output is easily explained by gravitational binding energy.
The idea of brown dwarf stars is not a new one: stars that do not emit much if any visible light, but pump out heat and particles.
"Brown dwarf star" is not a thing. Brown Dwarves are by definition sub-stellar objects. They are not massive enough to sustain fusion reactions. The current definition puts the minimum mass much higher than Jupiter, though the boundary between brown dwarf and large planet is a fuzzy one. The boundary between brown dwarf and star, however, is much less so.
Not compared to Texas. (But then few sovereigns are. Texas outsizes many European countries.)
This is where an Alaskan steps in to point out you could comfortably fit two Texases into Alaska.
But in all honesty, Michigan isn't really that big for a state either. Sure there's plenty smaller, but when I think "big states" my native land doesn't even enter my mind. Moving to Texas just really put it into perspective.
Speaking of which: Is there any talk of Texas ever exercising its treaty option to break up into five states and get eight more senators?
No, I think that would be unconscionable. Become multiple smaller states? That'd be like breeding a Pigmy Longhorn steer -- the antithesis of Texas mindset. All they talk about is seccession (which they also claim to have the right to do, but we know how that goes).