Because it's the one we're observing it from. In a Relativistic universe, everything is relative to a frame of reference and you can't actually say anything about when things happen or their age outside of the context of a specific frame of reference.
Same reason all anime characters are Caucasion -- They aren't, you're just insular and programmed to recognize things of your own race. They actually much more closely match the traits of the Japanese, but because they don't match your own stereotypes of the Japanese very well (lemme guess, #1 thing you're looking for is they eyes, as opposed to say nose and jawline), they look more like white people to you. So it's not self-inflicted racism and an an obsession with white people on the part of the Japanese. It's racism and an obsession with white people on the part of white people.:P
And if you look at actual white people in anime, you may start to get the impression that they are much more likely racist against white people, not themselves.
Yes, Japan and China have societies where conformity is valued more than individuality. Quite a poignant observation you made about the punk rockers; this aspect even affects sub-cultures supposedly all about individuality.
Leaping from there to the square on your 'Jump to Conclusions' mat labeled "they fear trust and love" is hilarious in that insulting-but-okay-because-its-so-retarded way.
Yes you could find people willing to go on a one-way trip. Even people who are qualified. Sure.
But I don't see the point in sending anyone until we've done enough robotic exploration, excavation, processing, manufacturing, and assembly where there would already be pre-constructed habitats and stores of fuel.
And once you've got a pre-established mechanized facility for people to arrive at, I see no reason not to just wait a little longer until the fuel stores are larger, and a return trip is feasible.
I'm 100% for manned exploration. But I think the time when the only possible human exploration is of the one-way-trip variety and the time when we are far better served by robotic exploration are largely the same.
I mean we aren't talking visiting other solar systems here which may necessarily be one-way. If we can't bring people back from Mars then it's due to a serious lack of technical capability and resources. So, let's use robots until we've fixed the capability issue, and use the robots themselves to fix the resource issue.
It makes the definition unusable for anything other than a narrow purpose (which would be better served merely by enumerating a list of planets), but sure, let's call it a feature.
Any definition is unusable for extra-solar systems because we can't see them well enough. Which is exactly why it's a feature not to try to make the definition apply to an area that is still largely unknown. Wanting to create a definition with the intention of it applying everywhere, even in the unknown, is foolhardy.
What's the scientific reason to say that Ceres and Eris aren't planets?
They haven't even come close to clearing their orbits. And I don't mean within 10% like some definitions. I mean their orbits are thousands of times more cluttered than the objects that have cleared their orbits, creating a blatantly obvious gap.
The neighborhood of a body orbiting around the Sun is the region of space closer to the object than 1/3 it's distance to the Sun. Pluto (more accurately the Pluto/Charon pair) has cleared this particular neighborhood (aside from possible rare intrusions by Eris) to mass ratios which I believe comparable with Earth excluding its moon (though not the combined Earth/Moon system). It's a rather big region (almost reaching the orbit of Uranus, which is 11 AU in, which is why this particular number was chosen).
Exactly, you have to pic a fairly specific number to get that result. If you change it by 10% in either direction, the objects which do or don't apply will change drastically. But you pick the specific number that is required to get Pluto and not much else. With the IAU definition you don't need to draw such a specific, arbitrary line at all.
It's not that it's an inherently ridiculous definition. It's that there's no basis to say that narrow range of values is significant, while you're also deliberately avoiding looking at the huge and obvious gap between objects which have cleared their entire orbit thousands of times more. You're looking at only a small portion of the orbit, and a metric with large nmubers of examples in a broad range around it and no clear dividing line between.
Whereas looking at the entire orbit, there are 8 objects which are blatantly obviously different. You can't even try to deny that the difference isn't obvious between things that have cleared their entire orbit and those that haven't. The gap is huge.
So that's why your definition is not a good one. It is representative of no clear dividing line between planet and not-planet. The IAU definition undeniably targets a gigantic difference between the objects that apply and those that don't. Your metric sensitive to 10% variation, vs the IAUs 10,000x-tolerant metric.
The better definition is obvious -- it's the one where you can easily identify which planets match without having to quibble about the exact value. It's the one where, given no history of the objects involved and just a map of the known solar system, you can identify which ones are different.
Also, do you have a source for the nothing-in-11-AU metric? If you're just going by the orbits of known TNOs, then I wouldn't expect that definition to last for long. We're starting to discover more and more of them, and in the likely case that the mass in the Kuiper Belt is evenly distributed -- Pluto's meager gravitation is not going to force all the other objects to its lagrange points like Jupiter -- then we're going to find quite a few objects closer to Pluto. You'll have to (and, I'm sure, will) keep shrinking and shrinking your bubble to keep Pluto a planet.
But, you know, other than that, it's a decent definition.
it doesn't have holes, unlike the hollow shell which presumably is the likely end state of the IAU's definition. In other words, unlike the IAU's apparent choice, this is a genuine neighborhood.
No, the entire orbit, taken a as whole is a genuine 'neighborhood'. And I can't believe you're seriously arguing it's a problem that the good definition of neighborhood is
It makes the definition unusable for anything other than a narrow purpose (which would be better served merely by enumerating a list of planets), but sure, let's call it a feature.
Any definition is unusable for extra-solar systems because we can't see them well enough. Which is exactly why it's a feature not to try to make the definition apply to an area that is still largely unknown. Wanting to create a definition with the intention of it applying everywhere, even in the unknown, is foolhardy.
What's the scientific reason to say that Ceres and Eris aren't planets?
They haven't even come close to clearing their orbits.
The neighborhood of a body orbiting around the Sun is the region of space closer to the object than 1/3 it's distance to the Sun. Pluto (more accurately the Pluto/Charon pair) has cleared this particular neighborhood (aside from possible rare intrusions by Eris) to mass ratios which I believe comparable with Earth excluding its moon (though not the combined Earth/Moon system). It's a rather big region (almost reaching the orbit of Uranus, which is 11 AU in, which is why this particular number was chosen).
Exactly, you have to pic a fairly specific number to get that result. If you change it by 10% in either direction, the objects which do or don't apply will change drastically. But you pick the specific number that is required to get Pluto and not much else. With the IAU definition you don't need to draw such a specific, arbitrary line at all.
It's not that it's an inherently ridiculous definition. It's that there's no basis to say that narrow range of values is significant, while you're also deliberately avoiding looking at the huge and obvious gap between objects which have cleared their entire orbit thousands of times more. You're looking at only a small portion of the orbit, and a metric with large nmubers of examples in a broad range around it and no clear dividing line between.
Whereas looking at the entire orbit, there are 8 objects which are blatantly obviously different. You can't even try to deny that the difference isn't obvious between things that have cleared their entire orbit and those that haven't. The gap is huge.
So that's why your definition is not a good one. It is representative of no clear dividing line between planet and not-planet. The IAU definition undeniably targets a gigantic difference between the objects that apply and those that don't. Your metric sensitive to 10% variation, vs the IAUs 10,000x-tolerant metric.
The better definition is obvious -- it's the one where you can easily identify which planets match without having to quibble about the exact value. It's the one where, given no history of the objects involved and just a map of the known solar system, you can identify which ones are different.
Also, do you have a source for the nothing-in-11-AU metric? If you're just going by the orbits of known TNOs, then I wouldn't expect that definition to last for long. We're starting to discover more and more of them, and in the likely case that the mass in the Kuiper Belt is evenly distributed -- Pluto's meager gravitation is not going to force all the other objects to its lagrange points like Jupiter -- then we're going to find quite a few objects closer to Pluto. You'll have to (and, I'm sure, will) keep shrinking and shrinking your bubble to keep Pluto a planet.
But, you know, other than that, it's a decent definition.
it doesn't have holes, unlike the hollow shell which presumably is the likely end state of the IAU's definition. In other words, unlike the IAU's apparent choice, this is a genuine neighborhood.
No, the entire orbit, taken a as whole is a genuine 'neighborhood'. And I can't believe you're seriously arguing it's a problem that the good definition of neighborhood is a shell and therefore has "holes". Hello, the orbits themselves have "holes" in that sense. So... maybe make the definition match reality in som
It's an observation, not a specific criterion, and you don't count direct satellites, because the moon is in orbit around the earth, not another object in an earth-like orbit around the sun (it is, but as a consequence of orbiting the earth). When the point is gravitational dominance of the orbit, the moon can hardly be counted against the earth which gravitationally dominates it now can it? Similarly Charon doesn't count against Pluto but it's still not even remotely close to gravitationally dominant.
You seem to be treating "science" as if it comes in interchangeable units. So if ground-based telescopes can produce "more science" for the same cost, they're better. But that's not how it works.
There are specific questions in the realm of astronomy and physics, fundamental issues about the nature of matter and the birth of the universe, which cannot be answered by observations with ground telescopes alone. The observations of those telescopes, and the observations of space telescopes like Hubble and Webb, are not interchangeable. They do not produce the same science. And the science produced by combining observations from both cannot be produced by either alone.
So you need to account for the fact that Hubble is providing a specific, highly desirable, and otherwise unattainable scientific benefit, and the inherent cost of providing it, or your price/performance metric is busted.
Considered that way, the price was higher than I'd like yet not ridiculous considering it necessarily had to operate in space, but the performance is simply amazing, and in my book that comes out to a pretty damn good investment.
No ground-based telescope is going to be able to observe at the infrared wavelengths that are needed to observe the ancient universe.
So it's not about "more science". It's about science that can't be done in any other way. You could probably find a way to get more science out of the funds spent on the LHC, but not that science.
No it isn't. It's a definition, and an arbitrary one since the class "planet" as currently defined has no particular physical significance.
You don't find it significant that there are 8 bodies in the solar system that have a larger than 1000:1 ratio of their mass to the mass of other objects in the orbit, and that the object with the next largest ratio after that is well under 1:1? I think it indicates a very significant orbit-clearing ability for the larger bodies that Pluto, Ceres, and Eris simply don't have.
Even if you don't think it is significant, it certainly is a fact.
I guess technically "I think Pluto should still be a planet for entirely sentimental reasons" is still a factual statement. But it's a fact about the person saying it, not about Pluto.
1) The IAU definition doesn't cover extrasolar planets. Hence, the definition is applicable to only one star system.
That's a feature. They're expressly not defining "planet" in areas where we have little experience. That's vastly superior than arbitrarily guessing just because you hate non-universal definitions.
2) The IAU definition depends on the dynamics of the system, which can change.
Also a feature. It's been a long time since the universe was viewed as static and unchanging. Yes Luna could become a planet. So what?
3) The IAU failed to define "cleared the neighborhood". I know about the appropriate paper which spawned this choice of phrase, but I also know that the IAU didn't adopt that definition. Being a mathematician, I am aware of many other valid definitions of "neighborhood", some which would allow Pluto to be a planet and some which wouldn't.
I'm sure you could come up with a definition, but would it hit on any salient, obvious distinguishing features like the existing ones? Could you come with a definition of "neighborhood" that made Pluto a planet, but not Ceres or Eris? Or a thousand other objects? Maybe. But that would be a very precise and completely arbitrary definition.
Whereas there is a huge class of varying metrics by which it is flagrantly obvious that Neptune has cleared its neighborhood, and Pluto, Ceres, and Eris haven't even come close.
Not picking a specific one is, again, a feature because it leaves the door open for future observations which might indicate that one or another metric is more useful, rather than arbitrarily deciding today when just about any reasonable metric agrees with the IAU classifications.
Maybe it's because you're a mathematician that you feel every definition must be defined with infinite precision and universal applicability. But classifications in astronomy (and biology and geology etc etc) are rarely served by such definitions.
4) As a result of the above ambiguity, the IAU had to explicitly enumerate the list of planets.
It's only ambiguous because people like you said "Hey, I could define 'neighborhood' to mean 'within 5 angstroms of the surface' and then every particle of dust is a planet!" Yes, bravo for you. Anyway, here's what the obvious inference is when you decide to be reasonable.
So why is a "dwarf planet" not a "planet"? It's bad grammar.
I see you left the big guns for last. Guess what? It's not grammar, it's a name. "Pygmy chimpanzees" are not chimpanzees. Oh noes. Personally I think they adopted the term just to try to appease people by having the word "planet" associated in some way with Pluto. Not that this did any good, obviously.
It's perfectly simple: Pluto is not a Dwarf Planet, Pluto is a Fucking Planet. Ask just about anyone geeky and my age,, and they'll telll you so: "yes, Pluto is a Fucking Planet, now stop trying to change things".
And you'll be as wrong as those who resisted reclassifying Ceres from planet to non-planet.
Oh, what's that, you don't think Ceres is a planet? It's pretty obvious that what just happens to be the biggest asteroid in a giant asteroid belt that's total mass is 3 times this one body is cool, but not a planet?
Yeah, that's exactly what geeks will be saying about Pluto in twenty years.
Tradition, not any salient facts, are the only reason people resist reclassifying Pluto. Tough. Science moves on. We know things about (Ceres|Pluto) that we didn't know when we discovered it. You can adjust to this knew information, or you can stamp your foot and refuse to change.
Which is fine. But the world will change with or without you.
The rest of the definition is noise because they failed to define "clearing the neighborhood".
Noise?!
There's FIVE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE difference in planetary discriminant (mass ratio between the body and all other masses in that orbit) between the highest value for a dwarf planet (Ceres) and the lowest value for a planet (Neptune).
When the difference is a factor of 10,000, there's absolutely no need to create a precise definition, and it would be foolish to do so.
It's like you're arguing that the definition of what is or isn't ocean is useless because it doesn't precisely define at what point of the tide cycle, or how far up a river mouth, it transitions from ocean to not ocean. But the question we're asking is whether Topeka, Kansas is in the ocean or not and the answer is obviously NO!
You might as well argue that it's completely arbitrary to say that you are alive and Benjamin Franklin is dead, because science has not precisely defined the exact line between dead and not dead. Um, I think it's still pretty clear which is which in this case.
You see, if they did actually define "clearing the neighborhood" in a precise manner, that would be the truly arbitrary choice. But when you look at the bodies in our solar system, and you see that there's a small set of objects which outweigh everything else in their orbits by at least a thousand-to-1, and then a great many objects which weigh less than the rest of the objects in their orbit, then yes that actually makes a clear dividing line. You don't have to draw it with infinite precision to see that it's there.
The definiton of Pluto as a planet is far more "noise" than the definition that it isn't. We only called it a planet because we didn't know it was so different from the other ones. It's like when we first discovered Ceres. Only we changed that one pretty quick, even though it's more planet-like than Pluto is.
Plus, they'll have to check their atom count against, guess what?, the cylinder in Paris. I wonder if they have a balance sensitive enough to detect +/- 1 Si atom difference?
They don't need one. The whole point is that the cylinders are not a reliable or repeatable measure. So they'll get as close a measurement as they can, and it'll have a margin of error that is +/- some number of Si atoms. They'll pick some number of Si atoms in that range, and that will be the new definition of the kilogram and at that point the cylinder doesn't matter any more other than for historical purposes. Plus thanks to the regular structure of crystals you can do a lot better than just weighing them to count the number of atoms. So it will be a more precise measure in the future.
I think they're much more likely to "unofficially" support Linux by working with the Wine folks to improve the performance/stability of SC2 than to do a port. This is basically what they've done with WoW, and now WoW is quite stable under Linux, performs well (slower than on windows mostly because the OpenGL render path works better but is just less well optimized in general), and most importantly still works well after big patches. Used to be a huge pain getting WoW to work after every minor patch. Now, the huge 4.0 patch dropped and I had no issues whatsoever related to Wine.
You mean the prank where you release 3 goats, and everyone just looks at you and says "Wow, sucks that your goats got loose. Good luck catching them," and then goes back to playing beach volleyball?
Slashdot Mirror
If it's a pulsar, it's a neutron star; degenerate matter,
Geeze. Judgmental anyone?
I feel superior because I know enough about it to know I don't understand it. How's that work for your irony meter? :)
Why does *our frame* matter so?
Because it's the one we're observing it from. In a Relativistic universe, everything is relative to a frame of reference and you can't actually say anything about when things happen or their age outside of the context of a specific frame of reference.
Whenever I use one of these they always either spit out a bottle of Clearasil, or a paper bag with eye holes cut out.
And will be carrying a Hellfire missile, just in case said life decides to get uppity.
Or just to make the end-of-life for the UAV much more exciting. Either way.
Same reason all anime characters are Caucasion -- They aren't, you're just insular and programmed to recognize things of your own race. They actually much more closely match the traits of the Japanese, but because they don't match your own stereotypes of the Japanese very well (lemme guess, #1 thing you're looking for is they eyes, as opposed to say nose and jawline), they look more like white people to you. So it's not self-inflicted racism and an an obsession with white people on the part of the Japanese. It's racism and an obsession with white people on the part of white people. :P
And if you look at actual white people in anime, you may start to get the impression that they are much more likely racist against white people, not themselves.
Yes, Japan and China have societies where conformity is valued more than individuality. Quite a poignant observation you made about the punk rockers; this aspect even affects sub-cultures supposedly all about individuality.
Leaping from there to the square on your 'Jump to Conclusions' mat labeled "they fear trust and love" is hilarious in that insulting-but-okay-because-its-so-retarded way.
Good show. I look forward to future performances.
Yes you could find people willing to go on a one-way trip. Even people who are qualified. Sure.
But I don't see the point in sending anyone until we've done enough robotic exploration, excavation, processing, manufacturing, and assembly where there would already be pre-constructed habitats and stores of fuel.
And once you've got a pre-established mechanized facility for people to arrive at, I see no reason not to just wait a little longer until the fuel stores are larger, and a return trip is feasible.
I'm 100% for manned exploration. But I think the time when the only possible human exploration is of the one-way-trip variety and the time when we are far better served by robotic exploration are largely the same.
I mean we aren't talking visiting other solar systems here which may necessarily be one-way. If we can't bring people back from Mars then it's due to a serious lack of technical capability and resources. So, let's use robots until we've fixed the capability issue, and use the robots themselves to fix the resource issue.
It makes the definition unusable for anything other than a narrow purpose (which would be better served merely by enumerating a list of planets), but sure, let's call it a feature.
Any definition is unusable for extra-solar systems because we can't see them well enough. Which is exactly why it's a feature not to try to make the definition apply to an area that is still largely unknown. Wanting to create a definition with the intention of it applying everywhere, even in the unknown, is foolhardy.
What's the scientific reason to say that Ceres and Eris aren't planets?
They haven't even come close to clearing their orbits. And I don't mean within 10% like some definitions. I mean their orbits are thousands of times more cluttered than the objects that have cleared their orbits, creating a blatantly obvious gap.
The neighborhood of a body orbiting around the Sun is the region of space closer to the object than 1/3 it's distance to the Sun. Pluto (more accurately the Pluto/Charon pair) has cleared this particular neighborhood (aside from possible rare intrusions by Eris) to mass ratios which I believe comparable with Earth excluding its moon (though not the combined Earth/Moon system). It's a rather big region (almost reaching the orbit of Uranus, which is 11 AU in, which is why this particular number was chosen).
Exactly, you have to pic a fairly specific number to get that result. If you change it by 10% in either direction, the objects which do or don't apply will change drastically. But you pick the specific number that is required to get Pluto and not much else. With the IAU definition you don't need to draw such a specific, arbitrary line at all.
It's not that it's an inherently ridiculous definition. It's that there's no basis to say that narrow range of values is significant, while you're also deliberately avoiding looking at the huge and obvious gap between objects which have cleared their entire orbit thousands of times more. You're looking at only a small portion of the orbit, and a metric with large nmubers of examples in a broad range around it and no clear dividing line between.
Whereas looking at the entire orbit, there are 8 objects which are blatantly obviously different. You can't even try to deny that the difference isn't obvious between things that have cleared their entire orbit and those that haven't. The gap is huge.
So that's why your definition is not a good one. It is representative of no clear dividing line between planet and not-planet. The IAU definition undeniably targets a gigantic difference between the objects that apply and those that don't. Your metric sensitive to 10% variation, vs the IAUs 10,000x-tolerant metric.
The better definition is obvious -- it's the one where you can easily identify which planets match without having to quibble about the exact value. It's the one where, given no history of the objects involved and just a map of the known solar system, you can identify which ones are different.
Also, do you have a source for the nothing-in-11-AU metric? If you're just going by the orbits of known TNOs, then I wouldn't expect that definition to last for long. We're starting to discover more and more of them, and in the likely case that the mass in the Kuiper Belt is evenly distributed -- Pluto's meager gravitation is not going to force all the other objects to its lagrange points like Jupiter -- then we're going to find quite a few objects closer to Pluto. You'll have to (and, I'm sure, will) keep shrinking and shrinking your bubble to keep Pluto a planet.
But, you know, other than that, it's a decent definition.
it doesn't have holes, unlike the hollow shell which presumably is the likely end state of the IAU's definition. In other words, unlike the IAU's apparent choice, this is a genuine neighborhood.
No, the entire orbit, taken a as whole is a genuine 'neighborhood'. And I can't believe you're seriously arguing it's a problem that the good definition of neighborhood is
Erm, oops... Replied to the wrong post...
It makes the definition unusable for anything other than a narrow purpose (which would be better served merely by enumerating a list of planets), but sure, let's call it a feature.
Any definition is unusable for extra-solar systems because we can't see them well enough. Which is exactly why it's a feature not to try to make the definition apply to an area that is still largely unknown. Wanting to create a definition with the intention of it applying everywhere, even in the unknown, is foolhardy.
What's the scientific reason to say that Ceres and Eris aren't planets?
They haven't even come close to clearing their orbits.
The neighborhood of a body orbiting around the Sun is the region of space closer to the object than 1/3 it's distance to the Sun. Pluto (more accurately the Pluto/Charon pair) has cleared this particular neighborhood (aside from possible rare intrusions by Eris) to mass ratios which I believe comparable with Earth excluding its moon (though not the combined Earth/Moon system). It's a rather big region (almost reaching the orbit of Uranus, which is 11 AU in, which is why this particular number was chosen).
Exactly, you have to pic a fairly specific number to get that result. If you change it by 10% in either direction, the objects which do or don't apply will change drastically. But you pick the specific number that is required to get Pluto and not much else. With the IAU definition you don't need to draw such a specific, arbitrary line at all.
It's not that it's an inherently ridiculous definition. It's that there's no basis to say that narrow range of values is significant, while you're also deliberately avoiding looking at the huge and obvious gap between objects which have cleared their entire orbit thousands of times more. You're looking at only a small portion of the orbit, and a metric with large nmubers of examples in a broad range around it and no clear dividing line between.
Whereas looking at the entire orbit, there are 8 objects which are blatantly obviously different. You can't even try to deny that the difference isn't obvious between things that have cleared their entire orbit and those that haven't. The gap is huge.
So that's why your definition is not a good one. It is representative of no clear dividing line between planet and not-planet. The IAU definition undeniably targets a gigantic difference between the objects that apply and those that don't. Your metric sensitive to 10% variation, vs the IAUs 10,000x-tolerant metric.
The better definition is obvious -- it's the one where you can easily identify which planets match without having to quibble about the exact value. It's the one where, given no history of the objects involved and just a map of the known solar system, you can identify which ones are different.
Also, do you have a source for the nothing-in-11-AU metric? If you're just going by the orbits of known TNOs, then I wouldn't expect that definition to last for long. We're starting to discover more and more of them, and in the likely case that the mass in the Kuiper Belt is evenly distributed -- Pluto's meager gravitation is not going to force all the other objects to its lagrange points like Jupiter -- then we're going to find quite a few objects closer to Pluto. You'll have to (and, I'm sure, will) keep shrinking and shrinking your bubble to keep Pluto a planet.
But, you know, other than that, it's a decent definition.
it doesn't have holes, unlike the hollow shell which presumably is the likely end state of the IAU's definition. In other words, unlike the IAU's apparent choice, this is a genuine neighborhood.
No, the entire orbit, taken a as whole is a genuine 'neighborhood'. And I can't believe you're seriously arguing it's a problem that the good definition of neighborhood is a shell and therefore has "holes". Hello, the orbits themselves have "holes" in that sense. So... maybe make the definition match reality in som
It's an observation, not a specific criterion, and you don't count direct satellites, because the moon is in orbit around the earth, not another object in an earth-like orbit around the sun (it is, but as a consequence of orbiting the earth). When the point is gravitational dominance of the orbit, the moon can hardly be counted against the earth which gravitationally dominates it now can it? Similarly Charon doesn't count against Pluto but it's still not even remotely close to gravitationally dominant.
You seem to be treating "science" as if it comes in interchangeable units. So if ground-based telescopes can produce "more science" for the same cost, they're better. But that's not how it works.
There are specific questions in the realm of astronomy and physics, fundamental issues about the nature of matter and the birth of the universe, which cannot be answered by observations with ground telescopes alone. The observations of those telescopes, and the observations of space telescopes like Hubble and Webb, are not interchangeable. They do not produce the same science. And the science produced by combining observations from both cannot be produced by either alone.
So you need to account for the fact that Hubble is providing a specific, highly desirable, and otherwise unattainable scientific benefit, and the inherent cost of providing it, or your price/performance metric is busted.
Considered that way, the price was higher than I'd like yet not ridiculous considering it necessarily had to operate in space, but the performance is simply amazing, and in my book that comes out to a pretty damn good investment.
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos.
In fifty years, your grand kids will learn in school that there are 8 planets, and many smaller objects in the asteroid and Kuiper belts.
And when Grandpa says "Hogwash! Pluto's a planet dag nabbit!" they'll just roll their eyes.
Wow, it does. Make it so!
No ground-based telescope is going to be able to observe at the infrared wavelengths that are needed to observe the ancient universe.
So it's not about "more science". It's about science that can't be done in any other way. You could probably find a way to get more science out of the funds spent on the LHC, but not that science.
Split the difference?
Spaceosphere!
No it isn't. It's a definition, and an arbitrary one since the class "planet" as currently defined has no particular physical significance.
You don't find it significant that there are 8 bodies in the solar system that have a larger than 1000:1 ratio of their mass to the mass of other objects in the orbit, and that the object with the next largest ratio after that is well under 1:1? I think it indicates a very significant orbit-clearing ability for the larger bodies that Pluto, Ceres, and Eris simply don't have.
Even if you don't think it is significant, it certainly is a fact.
I guess technically "I think Pluto should still be a planet for entirely sentimental reasons" is still a factual statement. But it's a fact about the person saying it, not about Pluto.
1) The IAU definition doesn't cover extrasolar planets. Hence, the definition is applicable to only one star system.
That's a feature. They're expressly not defining "planet" in areas where we have little experience. That's vastly superior than arbitrarily guessing just because you hate non-universal definitions.
2) The IAU definition depends on the dynamics of the system, which can change.
Also a feature. It's been a long time since the universe was viewed as static and unchanging. Yes Luna could become a planet. So what?
3) The IAU failed to define "cleared the neighborhood". I know about the appropriate paper which spawned this choice of phrase, but I also know that the IAU didn't adopt that definition. Being a mathematician, I am aware of many other valid definitions of "neighborhood", some which would allow Pluto to be a planet and some which wouldn't.
I'm sure you could come up with a definition, but would it hit on any salient, obvious distinguishing features like the existing ones? Could you come with a definition of "neighborhood" that made Pluto a planet, but not Ceres or Eris? Or a thousand other objects? Maybe. But that would be a very precise and completely arbitrary definition.
Whereas there is a huge class of varying metrics by which it is flagrantly obvious that Neptune has cleared its neighborhood, and Pluto, Ceres, and Eris haven't even come close.
Not picking a specific one is, again, a feature because it leaves the door open for future observations which might indicate that one or another metric is more useful, rather than arbitrarily deciding today when just about any reasonable metric agrees with the IAU classifications.
Maybe it's because you're a mathematician that you feel every definition must be defined with infinite precision and universal applicability. But classifications in astronomy (and biology and geology etc etc) are rarely served by such definitions.
4) As a result of the above ambiguity, the IAU had to explicitly enumerate the list of planets.
It's only ambiguous because people like you said "Hey, I could define 'neighborhood' to mean 'within 5 angstroms of the surface' and then every particle of dust is a planet!" Yes, bravo for you. Anyway, here's what the obvious inference is when you decide to be reasonable.
So why is a "dwarf planet" not a "planet"? It's bad grammar.
I see you left the big guns for last. Guess what? It's not grammar, it's a name. "Pygmy chimpanzees" are not chimpanzees. Oh noes. Personally I think they adopted the term just to try to appease people by having the word "planet" associated in some way with Pluto. Not that this did any good, obviously.
It's perfectly simple: Pluto is not a Dwarf Planet, Pluto is a Fucking Planet. Ask just about anyone geeky and my age,, and they'll telll you so: "yes, Pluto is a Fucking Planet, now stop trying to change things".
And you'll be as wrong as those who resisted reclassifying Ceres from planet to non-planet.
Oh, what's that, you don't think Ceres is a planet? It's pretty obvious that what just happens to be the biggest asteroid in a giant asteroid belt that's total mass is 3 times this one body is cool, but not a planet?
Yeah, that's exactly what geeks will be saying about Pluto in twenty years.
Tradition, not any salient facts, are the only reason people resist reclassifying Pluto. Tough. Science moves on. We know things about (Ceres|Pluto) that we didn't know when we discovered it. You can adjust to this knew information, or you can stamp your foot and refuse to change.
Which is fine. But the world will change with or without you.
The rest of the definition is noise because they failed to define "clearing the neighborhood".
Noise?!
There's FIVE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE difference in planetary discriminant (mass ratio between the body and all other masses in that orbit) between the highest value for a dwarf planet (Ceres) and the lowest value for a planet (Neptune).
When the difference is a factor of 10,000, there's absolutely no need to create a precise definition, and it would be foolish to do so.
It's like you're arguing that the definition of what is or isn't ocean is useless because it doesn't precisely define at what point of the tide cycle, or how far up a river mouth, it transitions from ocean to not ocean. But the question we're asking is whether Topeka, Kansas is in the ocean or not and the answer is obviously NO!
You might as well argue that it's completely arbitrary to say that you are alive and Benjamin Franklin is dead, because science has not precisely defined the exact line between dead and not dead. Um, I think it's still pretty clear which is which in this case.
You see, if they did actually define "clearing the neighborhood" in a precise manner, that would be the truly arbitrary choice. But when you look at the bodies in our solar system, and you see that there's a small set of objects which outweigh everything else in their orbits by at least a thousand-to-1, and then a great many objects which weigh less than the rest of the objects in their orbit, then yes that actually makes a clear dividing line. You don't have to draw it with infinite precision to see that it's there.
The definiton of Pluto as a planet is far more "noise" than the definition that it isn't. We only called it a planet because we didn't know it was so different from the other ones. It's like when we first discovered Ceres. Only we changed that one pretty quick, even though it's more planet-like than Pluto is.
Plus, they'll have to check their atom count against, guess what?, the cylinder in Paris. I wonder if they have a balance sensitive enough to detect +/- 1 Si atom difference?
They don't need one. The whole point is that the cylinders are not a reliable or repeatable measure. So they'll get as close a measurement as they can, and it'll have a margin of error that is +/- some number of Si atoms. They'll pick some number of Si atoms in that range, and that will be the new definition of the kilogram and at that point the cylinder doesn't matter any more other than for historical purposes. Plus thanks to the regular structure of crystals you can do a lot better than just weighing them to count the number of atoms. So it will be a more precise measure in the future.
I think they're much more likely to "unofficially" support Linux by working with the Wine folks to improve the performance/stability of SC2 than to do a port. This is basically what they've done with WoW, and now WoW is quite stable under Linux, performs well (slower than on windows mostly because the OpenGL render path works better but is just less well optimized in general), and most importantly still works well after big patches. Used to be a huge pain getting WoW to work after every minor patch. Now, the huge 4.0 patch dropped and I had no issues whatsoever related to Wine.
You mean the prank where you release 3 goats, and everyone just looks at you and says "Wow, sucks that your goats got loose. Good luck catching them," and then goes back to playing beach volleyball?