Dear Pluto fetishists,

[gordonzola]

WTF? No one knocked it out of the sky. It's still there. It can still be your favorite interstellar object even if it's not a planet.

As I said in a comment elsewhere, it's like being upset that evolution is (mostly) being taught in school or that Drake's Plate is now taught to be a fraud (which was a big issue when I was in grade school). I am fully willing to let scientists in that field decide on the definition of planets and do not feel like it should be up to popular vote.

It's not like science doesn't have an agenda at times. But it's hard to find one here beyond having a reasonable definition to work with.

Comments

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Actually, I got more irked about this after hearing about the way the process happened: by popular vote. Total votes: 424 out of 2700 attendees at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague.

So, if I understand this correctly, Pluto got downgraded by the same mechanism that a rule change is voted on at a science-fiction convention. That's not so much about science as it is about the feelings of people who come to the business meeting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_redefinition_of_planet makes for entertaining reading on the topic. It doesn't include the post-vote comment by astronomer David Brown (in a USA Today article for which I can't find the link at the moment), who said that the new definition "brings magic back into the solar system."

[strix-an-stones.livejournal.com]

Interesting for sure. I felt a moment of kinship with Pluto, being a small person considering a dwarf plantet. Then it jsut seemed so damned absurd. Next we're going to have medical d00bs wanting to change the classification for dwarfism and culling the smallest of our number as being a Small Humanoid Body and not imply human.

People are weird.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

well yeah, except that I assume they are all experts in the field in some way. As opposed to someone who just bought a ticket. And if people really felt strongly, more probably would have voted. They're academics, they know how to have drama if they feel it's warranted.

Bring on the planets

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Experts can go off on wild tangents just as much as anyone else. ...And after all, there was drama, played out in the newspapers just as if Britney Spears Nerderline were gestating her own little Charon.

I keep thinking about the human element behind scientific & technological endeavors. E.g., Tesla vs. Edison. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that two major opposing players in the push to reclassify Pluto had had bad business dealings, for example.

From what I read in Wikipedia and elsewhere, especially since the definition of "planet" still leaves so much room for doubt (Earth hasn't cleared its own neighborhood, and so forth), I've decided that some people thought that Pluto was just too messy. It's not as much about science as it is about someone wanting all their towels to line up on the ecliptic rack. They drew an arbitrary line.