The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (12 page)
Read The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet Online
Authors: Neil deGrasse Tyson
What gives? Did someone there have a memory lapse? What will it take to get Pluto back up there where it belongs?
Staehle would later follow with an observation of nature that we can all agree with:
In the end, neither Pluto nor anything else in the outer Solar System cares in the slightest what anybody on Earth labels it. These bodies exist, and hold what they have to reveal about our collective natural history, totally without regard to any label assigned by an august body of scientists, or any other living thing that we know of.
Michael A’Hearn, of the University of Maryland, who was kind enough to participate in our Pluto panel two years earlier, shared a perceptive pedagogical observation:
I am struck by the fact that the people who seem most wedded to keeping Pluto a planet are systematically the people who do not have to teach the subject (either to students or the public) on a day to day basis.
Timothy Ferris, the best-selling science writer, was quick to offer support, combined with a prescient statement of the long-term outcome of our decision:
Unhindered by any prejudices on the subject other than a personal liking for Clyde Tombaugh, a good man whose advice was central in my design of Rocky Hill Observatory, I reviewed the case and concluded that, hell, Pluto is not a planet. So I think you guys did the right thing, and will in the long run be viewed as having led the bird when your only alternative was to miss.
Long before Mark Sykes had come to New York City to get in my face and argue about Pluto, he sent an e-mail that was entirely consistent with his long-standing posture on the subject, outraged and full of energy:
I recall the “issue” starting out as a joke by Brian Marsden at a party in the late 80s. It seems the joke is on your institution. Unfortunately, it is the public who loses out. Minority opinions can be a wonderful starting point for an illuminating discussion, but to the extent your exhibit is meant to be educational, it should be identified as such and the argument engaged. Otherwise, you make a misrepresentation, in your silence, of the view commonly held by planetary scientists.
My Pluto in-box would not be complete without a quip from Alan Stern, sent years after the exhibit dustup. In a postscript to a letter on another subject, Stern was characteristically terse and firm, punctuated with a winking smiley face at the end:
It’s a planet, man. You gotta get over this.;-)
Bill Nye the Science Guy
®
, (seen in Figure 3.11), a consummate educator and hobbyist of linguistics, opined with a tutorial on much-needed nomenclature in the field of planetary science:
The great thing about this debate is that it has gotten people every-where thinking about planets and our place among them. It’s remarkable. The whole world it seems is full [of] people puzzling Pluto.
Words include more than they leave out. Words never say all there is to say about anything. So, I advocate some adjectives. I favor Pluto, Xena (or whatever its ultimate sobriquet), Sedna, and others being called generally “planets.” Then we’d have teaching opportunities with the adjectives or descriptors:
“Main Plane planets” (those in the plane of the ecliptic)
“Ice dwarf planets” or even “Plutonian” planets (spherical icy worlds akin to their namesake Pluto)
The expression Main Plane has assonance and is thereby easy to say and remember.
If all that was not enough, a brief lesson in Latin followed:
There are apparently untold “Plutonian,” or “Ice Dwarf,” planets beyond Neptune. These would or should be described as “ultra-Neptunian” planets. Nota bene, I feel strongly that my Latin teachers would suffer greatly to know that certain of my astronomical colleagues use the Latin “trans” to mean “beyond.” Sigh. “Trans” means “across.” There are occasional usages of traneo for “go past.” But to my ear, it’s not the same. For “beyond,” Romans use “ultra.” I hope the nomenclature committee(s) can come around on this one.
There aren’t many of them in the world, but Geoff Marcy, of the University of California at Berkeley, is one: a hunter of exoplanets.
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In reference to the views of Mark Sykes and the need to not rock the boat, Marcy had this to say:
He feels that mere science museums should communicate only the IAU party line. That’s not how I read the constitution, and it’s not how I read productive scientific discourse. Discussion of the issues should prevail, especially when the observables lean clearly one way. That the IAU has political agendas and recalcitrant members is no reason for us to shade the truth about Pluto.
Don Brownlee, planetary scientist at the University of Washington, was simple and direct with an opposing view:
Demoting Pluto to just another KBO is revisionist science and a cheap shot at history.
Of course, one might alternatively view revisions in science as a good thing—a sign of progress and discovery.
Wesley Huntress, former associate administrator of space science at NASA, wrote from the Carnegie Institute of Washington, where he served as director of its geophysical laboratory. After a brief admonishment, questioning whether the Rose Center has fallen wayward of scientific consensus, he reasons himself back to a position not fundamentally different from our own:
The Science Citadel of the Capital of the World should not confuse the public. Given the continuing discovery of Kuiper Belt Objects, and in particular, objects larger than Pluto and also having their own satellites, we need a new map of the “world” of the solar system as we explore its wider seas…. Our solar system has two belts of multiple small objects, the first between Mars and Jupiter containing rocky bodies, and the second beyond Neptune stretching far into interstellar space to the Oort Cloud that contains icy objects…. So we have an asteroid belt and a comet belt. The objects within them can be called minor planets if they are self-gravitating and therefore round; rock dwarfs in one case and ice dwarfs in the other. Otherwise they are asteroids or comets. Ceres is a rock-dwarf, Pluto is an ice-dwarf, and there are eight planets in the solar system.
Huntress ends by reflecting, as only a wise, empty-nest parent would—
Sometimes you have to let your children go.
Of course scientists
were not the only ones whose opinions came to my in-box. Before there was the
New York Times
, before there was CCNet, before there was Mark Sykes, before the New Horizons mission was sent to Pluto, there was Will Galmot, the first person to notice that Pluto was missing from our displays and to write us about it. This astute visitor to the museum did so ten months before the Rose Center’s Pluto story broke in the press. Mr. Galmot was apparently paying closer attention than everyone else during our first month of operation and had carefully researched the problem. Reproduced in Figure 5.1, Mr. Galmot’s terse correspondence was clear and to the point. And in case we were unsure of what Pluto looked like, Will used the artistic tools available to him and supplied a detailed image for our exhibit professionals to use.
By mid-2001, I was receiving organized packs of student letters every several weeks, sent by zealous teachers eager to tell me how their class voted on the matter. In June 2001, Miss Fedi’s fourth graders from Dean La Mar Allen Elementary School in Las Vegas, Nevada, voted 90 percent to 10 percent in favor of retaining Pluto’s status. You didn’t have to be a kid to feel this way. Craig Manister, a full-grown acquaintance, muttered to me at a cocktail party, “It’s like knowing when you get out of bed that the floor is solid.”
Over the years, I noticed a trend in the mail to my office from elementary schools. Slowly, legions of angry students move on, making room for new crops of students who may have never known the certainty of nine planets in the first place.
In a stack of letters sent in March 2005 from Mrs. Chemai Gray’s middle school class in Marysville, Washington, the split of votes for Pluto’s planet status had reached 50 percent in favor, 50 percent against, with students tending to offer arguments about size and tradition. A year later, other stacks of letters, including a second stack from the same teacher, showed that the students had become fluent in the Kuiper belt and the difference between icy and rocky objects in the solar system. They further gleaned a basic understanding of circular and elliptical orbits, and their correspondence was mostly devoid of emotion and sentimentality. By the end of 2006, letter tallies approached 90 percent against planet status and 10 percent in favor.
Meanwhile, others with opinions could not resist e-mailing me their commentary.
From the downright grumpy:
Figure 5.1.
Letter from Will Galmot.
Date: Feb 13, 2005, at 10:50 PM
I do not appreciate your attempting to demote Pluto to a non-planet.
I am 59 years old. I grew up on Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Although I have seen many changes in my life, one thing I am sure of is that there are nine planets in the Solar System, and that the smallest and most distant is Pluto.
Leave it alone.
Dan E. Burns
To “the child shall lead them”:
Date: November 18, 2004 7:09:13 PM EST
My name is John Glidden. I am six years old and my favorite planet is Pluto. I disagree with you that Pluto is a Kuiper Belt Object. I think Pluto is a real planet and I took a poll of 11 people. The question was, What do you think Pluto is?
A Planet
A Double Planet
A Kuiper Belt Object
A planet and A Kuiper Belt Object
I think it is a double planet and everyone else thought it is a regular real planet that is very cold.
I had a half day at school yesterday so my mom brought me to the Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium. I wanted to see you so I could tell you this in person.
John Glidden
To pleading with tongue-in-cheek arguments:
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 07:45:58 -0500
C’mon Neil. Let’s not go messing around with Pluto’s planethood.
Grandfather the little guy and get on with it. (If Ceres starts to make a fuss, toss him an honorary something). Why, stripping Pluto of his planethood is like stripping George Washington of his citizenship because the US wasn’t really a country when he was born.
In any case, the cost to make the change will be huge. There must be thousands of sets of twenty year old encylopedias that will have to be replaced. The number of encyclopedia salesmen required to do it will surely tilt the social fabric of the world.
Steve Leece
To mild accusations of cultural insensitivity:
Date: December 6, 2004 9:06:50 PM EST
Would you say a small child or midget wasn’t a person? Of course you wouldn’t, although they are a different versions of the normal standard that is set as what a person would like, but they are still classified as people. By saying that Pluto is not a planet, is like saying a midget or a small child is not a person.
Brooke Abrams
And to blunt obstinacy:
Date: November 13, 2003 9:01:07 AM EST
Pluto is a planet because I say so. I don’t think that something that I have been told all my life (namely, that Pluto is in fact a planet) should be doubted to the extreme that we must write a letter to some organization that does not in fact care what we think.
Lindsey Greene
Letters such as these provided months of entertaining reading, but little did I know, the assault had only just begun.
