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Laws of planetary commotion
I have to confess I’m a bit disheartened at the recent astronomical news that’s set one of who knows how many planets orbiting the Sun abuzz.
Not the discussion over whether Pluto (and Ceres and Charon and Provisional Xena and Sedna and Quaoar) are properly called planets. I find that fascinating, and I don’t care in the slightest what the result is. The discussion might end in a more precise taxonomy of large objects in the Solar system and perhaps elsewhere, and that’d be wonderful. Or it won’t, and we’ll all have another lesson taught us about Nature not respecting the arbitrary categories into which we squeeze events and objects, about which the astronomers coulda just asked the biologists. It’s win-win. Besides, the part of me that wrote, at age four, a letter to the local educational TV show about their getting the number of Jupiter’s moons wrong is just tickled to death over it all. It’s wonderful to have those bedrock assumptions about the universe challenged. Lets a little light into the old ossified cranium.
What’s disheartened me is the response from some people who for some reason I feel should know better though I’ve been repeatedly proven wrong. There’s been a fair amount of educated and humorous discussion, to be sure. But the overwhelming impression I get is that Americans don’t even have the slightest instinctive clue as to how science works. I suppose, given the success of creationism in this my country of birth, that I shouldn’t be surprised.
But consider the three main public positions that seem to have been staked out.
1) What? They can’t demote Pluto. We were all taught it was a planet for all these years
I guess this one’s predictable. The fear of learning, of being compelled to take in new information, is particularly rife among Americans. I can grasp this on an intellectual level. But I just don’t get it. How would the people advancing this argument react if a doctor treated them for a sore throat by bleeding them? Doctors were taught for centuries that bloodletting was an effective remedy for many such ailments. The doctors took nine pints of blood out of old George Washington to treat a throat infection. It’s an American tradition! (Never mind that it killed him.)
Even if you’re afraid of taking in new information, does it really help to just turn your back on the new information and whistle? Is denial of reality really so compelling a strategy for so many Americans? Don’t answer that.
2) Couldn’t they just grandfather Pluto in as a planet?
This is a bit of a corollary to the first response, a sort of liberal compromise between ignorance and reality. (Given that it’s as meaningless as the ignorance position, we could call it a Lieberman liberal compromise.)
Let’s imagine just for a moment that we all assumed cats were dogs. We tried to get them to go for walks on leash, with varying degrees of success. This small, hissy dog breed has been well known for not coming reliably when called, and don’t even get me started on the obedience training. No one understood why this was, though some people said quantum mechanics explained it all. And then one day a zoologist accounts for the marked diferences between hissy dogs and other dogs by realizing that hissy dogs are in fact not dogs at all, but cats. Would you ask your vet to “grandfather” Muffin in as a dog because you’ve called her a dog for so long? Maybe. She’d still be a cat. She’d still drop dead if you fed her dog aspirin. There is this little thing called empirical reality, you see, and it often refuses to negotiate.
3) This is the stupidest argument I’ve heard of in a long time.
I’ve mainly seen comments to the above effect on political blogs. There really should be a word that covers the gray area between “hilarious,” “depressing,” and “brain dead.” We’re only talking about the physiognomy of the goddamn universe here. Which is, of course, not nearly as important as whether a Reuters photographer added smoke to a badly executed photo.
It’s not just a label, people. The discussion centers on Pluto’s status as a planet (or not), but it is at its root a discussion about the structure and origins of planetary systems. What we generally think of as planets came about through a relatively similar process: the slow accretion of dust-sized particles, particle contact gaining in force as the particles grow larger until they had become incredibly violent collisions of gigantic objects. There are people who think the bodies out in the Kuiper Belt, Pluto being the largest, escaped that most violent stage.
The bodies everyone currently agrees are planets actually sort out into two radically different types of objects, with no intermediate forms, at least not nearby. We got the gas giants, Jupiter Saturn Neptune and Uranus. We got the terrestrial planets, Mercury Venus Earth Mars and sometimes Y perhaps Ceres. Maybe the planetologists will decide to call Pluto and Charon and Sedna “plutonian planets.” Maybe, as we learn more about what diversity exists in extrasolar planets, they’ll reassign the gas giants to some other non-planetary category. “Dud stars” or somesuch. Stellabortions? Maybe they’ll find a big ball of rock with a tall, thick atmosphere and declare it an intermediate form between rocky balls and gas giants. Maybe the Oort cloud is entirely composed of massive, ice-rimed monkey wrenches. We will have this discussion again.
I suspect that the dividing line between “planet” and “moon” will eventually be done away with, with “planet” describing size and structure, and “moon” denoting a planet or other body revolving around something other than a star. Or something like that. There need be no conflict in whether to call Titan or Ganymede or Luna a planet or a moon: they’re both. Or maybe I’m wrong, and there are good, solid scientific reasons to keep the distinction. Doesn’t matter. What’s important here is that the word “planet” came about when we knew almost nothing about the things we were labeling aside from the fact that they were bright lights that moved relative to the lights around them.
It’s fascinating no matter how it turns out. It’s not a football game or an example of PC run amok in the academy or (as one Kevin Drum commenter inanely suggested) a subject brought up to distract us from more important things. It’s a discussion of terminology, to be sure, and terminology always has its arbitrary aspects. But we’re talking about the way the universe is built, and I am rapt, even if some people think it a useless distraction from writing yet another opinion in the matter of Deb Frisch and Jeff Goldstein. (Have they set a date yet?)
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
I’ve been watching this for months and waiting for the announcement.
The only thing that would have pissed me off is if they had decided that Pluto would be a planet “so we don’t upset the schoolchildren” etc., like some people had complained.
Plus, I’ve always kinda felt that Ceres got ripped off, so I’m glad to see it’s probably back in again.
Some people are complaining that the Pluto/Charon thing is “messy,” but hey - whos ta say we can’t have a dual planet?
The one thing I don’t quite get… Charon is a planet because its round and it orbits a spot that is not inside the surface of another object. OK, I’m cool with that…
But then Pluto’s other moons are NOT planets because they aren’t round (ok, I’m following you) so instead they are just saying they are gonna just keep calling them moons… BUT, they also orbit a spot NOT inside Pluto’s surface.
So doesn’t that make them… thingies? Something else? Satellites-of-not-a-planet? Co-orbital companions? Fashionable Accessories?
By: By craig on 2006 08 16
“Moons of Nothing.” I vote for that.
Sounds maudlin. Makes you feel sorry for the poor little guys. Sounds like a Seals and Crofts song.
By: By craig on 2006 08 16
But isn’t that what we do? Is an animal a different species or just a subspecies, or even that? Sure, some things can’t have fertile offspring that aren’t squished into rough spheres by their own gravity or some such… but it’s all just “stuff” until we decide how to categorize it.
By: By craig on 2006 08 17
Sure, some things can’t have fertile offspring that aren’t squished into rough spheres by their own gravity or some such
Consider a spherical cow…
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 08 17
Consider a spherical cow…
Defeats tipping.
anyway, what I mean is if we decided that there was only one species, called “alive,” we’d be right, and nothing about nature would be different than it is now.
By: By craig on 2006 08 17
CMD, what a wonderful story!
By: By Stephanie on 2006 08 17
Cascadian, a dead log is lying on the ground. A stump is generally wider than tall. A standing dead tree, or the greater part of a dead tree still standing, is a snag.
Then there’s the underused word “stob,” which implies something broken off. The stob is the thing that’s still standing: e.g. a short irregular piece of tree sticking out of the water, or even the remainder of an old fencepost.
This gets useful when you’re trying to tell your partner just where you’re seeing the black-backed woodpecker, which is a piece of information that you’d best get across and fast.
By: By Ron Sullivan on 2006 08 17
Teresa! Welcome.
A pedant would point out that they did not rename Brontosaurus so much as eventually more or less agree that Apatosaurus had been improperly renamed Brontosaurus. But I am not that pedant. Brontosaurus is fine with me.
Now the attempt to rename Boa constrictor… that went too far.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 08 17
Some people are obviously not convinced of the importance of The Naming Of Things. Odd, since it underpins everything about our conception of the universe.
If geologists object to astronomers using plutonian, why not use chthulic instead?
By: By Rob G on 2006 08 18
Well, I’ve always figured that our model of reality will inevitably bear a weak relation to the great complexities of existence (‘cause if we tried to comprehend it all, our li’l’ primate minds would pop). So I have no problems with tweaking it so that it fits better. It’s a pain to re-learn things you’d been taking for granted, true, but I’m more interested in having a better understanding of the world itself than a firm mastery of a pale approximation.
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2006 08 18
One of my favorite names recently had a much closer brush with official extinction. The generic names of many animals are the same as their common designation: the gorilla is Gorilla; the rat, Rattus.But I know of only one case of a vernacular name identical with both generic and specific parts of the technical Latin. The boa constrictor is (but almost wasn’t) Boa constrictor, and it would be a damned shame if we lost this lovely consonance. Nevertheless, in 1976, Boa constrictor barely survived one of the closest contests ever brought before the [International C]ommission [on Zoological Nomenclature], as thirteen members voted to suppress this grand name in favor of Boa canina, while fifteen noble nays stood firm and saved the day.
— Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 08 18
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