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The Great Planet Debate conference, August 2008 - Washington DC
laurele
post Aug 12 2008, 10:33 PM
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QUOTE (Greg Hullender @ Aug 12 2008, 06:07 PM) *
Kids in school would learn the classical planets. Enterprising ones would learn the secondary and dwarf planets on their own.

--Greg


I like your ideas, but I think kids should be taught the dwarf planets and secondary planets too, not necessarily to memorize, but at least to illustrate that they are an important part of the solar system. Even back in the 70s when I was in elementary school, we learned about the larger moons of the planets. Leaving out Titan, the Galilean moons and the dwarf planets seems to me to be doing a disservice to the kids.
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tedstryk
post Aug 12 2008, 10:34 PM
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I thing the moon versus planet definition works. Even planet-sized moons have histories so intertwined with their parent planet that it separates them from objects in solar orbit (even Triton was melted down in the process of being captured).

I don't know if this would be a good one for the Planetary Society to get caught up in. The debate is to emotional. The Planetary Society is a non-partisan group (and I am referring to sides in scientific debates, not party politics, although that would also be true I guess), and to risk a result that makes it look petty or turns some of the community against it would be dangerous. Also, it is primarily a group that works to advocate the funding needs of Planetary Science in Congress and to educate the public about planetary science and planetary missions. That even includes educating people about what is being debated. But to step into a debate that some might see as an attempt to supplant the IAU and to risk having a position adopted that alienates some of its constituencies doesn't seem worth it.


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mcaplinger
post Aug 12 2008, 10:42 PM
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QUOTE (surreyguy @ Aug 12 2008, 02:10 PM) *
...while some categorisations are arbitrary, the good categorisatons are those which reflect theory in some way.

I'm not sure I would use "arbitrary" and "good" as opposites like this. Many (most?) uses of terminology are "arbitrary" but have managed to avoid the emotionalism and controversy that this one has caused.

If it were up to me, I would have just said that everything Pluto-sized and bigger was a planet and everything smaller wasn't, but somehow this has been dismissed as being too "unscientific".

The whole thing reminds me of the vociferous debate I was involved in about whether longitudes should be positive to the east or west (also horribly confused by the IAU.)


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JRehling
post Aug 12 2008, 11:46 PM
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QUOTE (Greg Hullender @ Aug 12 2008, 03:07 PM) *
Maybe it would help to give a special name to the Magic Eight; call them "Classical Planets" for example. Round, isolated, in circular orbits in the ecliptic -- they certainly SEEM special enough to merit special attention.
[...]
Kids in school would learn the classical planets. Enterprising ones would learn the secondary and dwarf planets on their own.


I don't understand what the motive is to create a term (even a reasonable one) for the purpose of singling out a group. If the purpose is to create a cutoff for educators, perhaps. But scientifically, Mars is still more similar to Pluto than it is to Saturn. Your comments above, especially the ones I've quoted, imply that this isn't about science but about providing direction to educators.

I'll point out that elementary school math teachers neither seek nor find direction in cutting-edge research mathematics, showing just how different those two sides of the topic are. Serious academics in mathematics interact with "quotients" all the time, but they aren't any better than your typical fourth-grade math teacher (who likely has forgotten any calculus they ever knew) to determine the nomenclature in an elementary school text. In fact, the math wonks are possibly especially poorly-suited to do that.

But this puts a pinpoint on the divide between the science issue and the educational issue. And I think the shame of it is that while educators should look to researchers for the basic facts (eg, does Venus have volcanoes?), which is an objective matter, this labeling and nomenclature is not an objective matter, and handing the reins to the researchers to help decide what the kiddies will be taught is just going to make people jaded about what scientists do.

As an aside, I have bought a number of books about the planets for my son, and the subtle misinformation that's rampant in most of them tells me that any possible lesson in classifying bodies correctly (if there were a "correctly") is way below the signal-noise ratio as it is.

(Sample misinformation: Venus's thick clouds MAKE its atmosphere dense.)
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pumpkinpie
post Aug 13 2008, 01:08 AM
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QUOTE (laurele @ Aug 12 2008, 04:33 PM) *
I like your ideas, but I think kids should be taught the dwarf planets and secondary planets too, not necessarily to memorize, but at least to illustrate that they are an important part of the solar system. Even back in the 70s when I was in elementary school, we learned about the larger moons of the planets. Leaving out Titan, the Galilean moons and the dwarf planets seems to me to be doing a disservice to the kids.


I taught over 16,000 students in a portable planetarium this year. Part of the show was letting the kids choose where in the solar system to visit. Most classes chose to go to Pluto. When I asked what it "is," close to 100% had at least one person who knew it was a dwarf planet. In most classes I heard a chorus of the correct answer.

Knowing its label, of course, isn't enough. That's just a form of memorization, and has no meaning without explanation. I would talk about why its category changed, and that there are bound to be more additions/subtractions/reclassifications as our knowledge of the solar system changes.
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Greg Hullender
post Aug 13 2008, 03:49 AM
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QUOTE (JRehling @ Aug 12 2008, 03:46 PM) *
Your comments above, especially the ones I've quoted, imply that this isn't about science but about providing direction to educators.

Educators are an interested party, since kids can understand this stuff. Contrast math, where higher math is utterly unintelligible to even a talented undergraduate student -- much less an elementary school kid.

It's not completely frivolous to consider educators. Fascination with the planets is a first step into science for many people.

To recap:

Planetary Scientists (not the Planetary Society!) ought to have first call; this is their field of study, so they have the biggest stake.

The IAU itself needs a criterion for assigning names, and that does need to be based on what can be observed -- not what properties might be observed if only we could send a probe.

But educators inspire the next generation -- both the young scientists and the interested non-scientists who are happy to see their tax dollars spent exploring space. Their needs cannot drive the definition, but any definition certainly needs to take them into account.

--Greg
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Greg Hullender
post Aug 13 2008, 04:01 AM
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QUOTE (pumpkinpie @ Aug 12 2008, 05:08 PM) *
I taught over 16,000 students in a portable planetarium this year. Part of the show was letting the kids choose where in the solar system to visit. Most classes chose to go to Pluto.


Yep, kids like superlatives. I felt that way as a kid too. It's hard to beat "furthest away," although I wonder if Jupiter came in second? (Actually I'd guess Saturn, since the rings are unique.) If they knew about Sedna, they might have picked that.

Pleasing the kids isn't the same as educating them, though. All kids know this already. :-)

--Greg

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nprev
post Aug 13 2008, 04:14 AM
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QUOTE (Greg Hullender @ Aug 12 2008, 07:49 PM) *
It's not completely frivolous to consider educators. Fascination with the planets is a first step into science for many people.


That's an excellent point on several levels; certainly I was first interested in science by the very concept of planets.

I hope that some educators will participate in the GPD. They may bring some perspective to the whole issue by defining concepts that really communicate with people (and, hopefully, not trying to sell a particular viewpoint.) SInce IMHO the whole thing is quite subjective, it might be much more important to make the final result intelligible & teachable.


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JRehling
post Aug 13 2008, 04:50 AM
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QUOTE (pumpkinpie @ Aug 12 2008, 06:08 PM) *
I taught over 16,000 students in a portable planetarium this year. Part of the show was letting the kids choose where in the solar system to visit. Most classes chose to go to Pluto. When I asked what it "is," close to 100% had at least one person who knew it was a dwarf planet. In most classes I heard a chorus of the correct answer.

Knowing its label, of course, isn't enough. That's just a form of memorization, and has no meaning without explanation. I would talk about why its category changed, and that there are bound to be more additions/subtractions/reclassifications as our knowledge of the solar system changes.


I would dispute that it is the "correct" answer any more than the law made "Pittsburg" the correct spelling of that city's name.

Age and background are important variables, but I think this Planet Debate -- not just the particular IAU decision, but the debate itself, as it's been transmitted -- is an absolute disaster for primary education. Speaking as a parent who's bought a few books for his son, some of which were updated with impressive speed. For very young kids, the meta-arguments about classification systems are completely incomprehensible. And I have books where the page devoted to Pluto is now half about this issue. This is a shame first because it displaces whatever else could have been said in that half-page. Second, because kids below a certain threshold of grasping abstractions totally miss whatever point could be made beautifully to a student of the philosophy of science. It's like taking an elementary school text about a tropical island with imagery and comments about the weather and diet and replacing them with information about how the local legislature works. For kids who are sufficiently below the level of understanding for that, it doesn't even provide the building blocks of understanding -- it's just 50 seconds of noise, the way a literature lecture in Hungarian would fail to educate a mature English speaker of one iota of the subject matter or Hungarian.

This subject matter near and dear to our hearts gets a limited amount of discussion in the classroom, and this issue only serves to crowd out some of the real content to replace it with opinion presented as fact. With a tinge of pedantry to boot. That's no wins and three losses.
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JRehling
post Aug 13 2008, 05:04 AM
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QUOTE (Greg Hullender @ Aug 12 2008, 08:49 PM) *
Educators are an interested party, since kids can understand this stuff. Contrast math, where higher math is utterly unintelligible to even a talented undergraduate student -- much less an elementary school kid.

It's not completely frivolous to consider educators. Fascination with the planets is a first step into science for many people.

To recap:

Planetary Scientists (not the Planetary Society!) ought to have first call; this is their field of study, so they have the biggest stake.

The IAU itself needs a criterion for assigning names, and that does need to be based on what can be observed -- not what properties might be observed if only we could send a probe.

But educators inspire the next generation -- both the young scientists and the interested non-scientists who are happy to see their tax dollars spent exploring space. Their needs cannot drive the definition, but any definition certainly needs to take them into account.


But kids cannot understand the comparative pros and cons of alternative classification systems. Not before about ninth or tenth grade, on average. Younger than that, and a discussion like that will just be noise. And if instead you just give them the IAU definition as fiat, you're passing opinion off as science.

No, it certainly is not frivolous to consider educators. I'd go much further -- this issue is primarily of interest to educators, and has done them the disservice of asking them to accept an arbitrary and divisive definition with the misinformation that it is a scientific truth newly had.

"This" is not Planetary Scientists field of study. As I mentioned before, the class of body that Pluto might be does not inform scientific papers on Pluto, just as papers about Mars do not hinge on Mars being a planet. Research scientists have no stake in this, but have chosen to browbeat educators into accepting a fiat which is not science, shaky classification, and poor education. And this would be equally true if they had (or "will", as they likely will, in time) handed down a definition ruling Pluto to be a planet.

Just to take an arbitrary example of the non-usefulness of this term for scientists, here's a poster/paper about the spectra of Pluto and Charon: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/acm2008/pdf/8150.pdf

The paper doesn't anywhere use the terms "planet" or "dwarf planet", or any terms for Charon, for that matter. Can we conceive of any way in which such terms could better inform the science, if they were included in this paper? For any proposed definition of "planet"? I sure can't think of one.

In essence, the term has no use for scientists. It has a folk use, like "hill" and "river", and is therefore useful in folk senses, in the classroom. For scientists to call this their field and therefore their term is like the legislature saying that city names are their field and therefore theirs to decide. So it began in Pittsburg and so it ended in Pittsburgh.
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Greg Hullender
post Aug 13 2008, 05:18 AM
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QUOTE (JRehling @ Aug 12 2008, 10:04 PM) *
In essence, the term has no use for scientists. It has a folk use, like "hill" and "river", and is therefore useful in folk senses, in the classroom. For scientists to call this their field and therefore their term is like the legislature saying that city names are their field and therefore theirs to decide. So it began in Pittsburg and so it ended in Pittsburgh.


It is this argument that I have been most bothered by -- it seems incredibly anti-science to me. But only a planetary scientist can answer it with any authority.

Your Pittsburgh example is poor by the way, since (the way I heard the story) it's the only US city that resisted standardization.

--Greg


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JRehling
post Aug 13 2008, 06:24 AM
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QUOTE (Greg Hullender @ Aug 12 2008, 10:18 PM) *
It is this argument that I have been most bothered by -- it seems incredibly anti-science to me. But only a planetary scientist can answer it with any authority.


That statement baffles me. Axiomatic trust in authority? Scientists have the answers because they are scientists?

In a software company, it's frequently evident that the engineers are not the best people to name things. Just because astronomy is not-for-profit doesn't change that. The engineers know the software best, spending their days hands-deep in it. That does not make them the best ones to lay down the nomenclature, either for internal or external purposes. It's quite a separate thing from the subject matter expertise.

While I would expect to trust scientists first in a scientific matter, this is a nonscientific matter which happens to be attached to objects that science studies. And while one might expect them to have uses for terms they use in their work, I cited the brief paper/abstract on Pluto to show that the term is not essential to science, and I would certainly welcome an example where the term "planet" was helpful to any scientific paper on any solar system object. If it's about Mars, it's about Mars.

And Pittsburgh is not a poor example because it's the only example of a place that resisted the fiat. One, because it's only the largest of several places. (Pittsburgh, KS; Edinburgh, Indiana; Plattsburgh, NY; Newburgh, NY; Newburgh, IN). Two, because the point is that public usage is a force to be reckoned with. If there were no local affection for a particular spelling elsewhere, then it was a one-sided tug-of-war that the authorities won by default. In Pittsburgh, the two went head to head and the authorities lost.
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alan
post Aug 13 2008, 07:22 AM
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It's too bad the debate tends to fixate on Pluto and whether the dwarf planets should be considered planets. I think the techniques used to decide which of the TNO's are dwarf planets is more interesting. For example, determining how large an object needs to be before it is in hydrostatic equilibrium, and the methods used to estimate the diameters of the objects.

I've seen some claims that an icy body would be in hydrostatic equilibrium if it is over 450 km in diameter. But I've also seen a presentation (IIRC by Tancredi) that used the shape of light curves and some models to estimate the density and roughness of objects which found a couple of objects to be either to rough or not dense enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium. Some of those objects have been estimated using infrared radiation detected by the Spitzer Space Telescope to be 600-700 km in diameter. It looks like these estimation methods will need to be verified by other methods such as determining the size and shape by observing stars being occulted by the objects.
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djellison
post Aug 13 2008, 07:44 AM
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QUOTE (JRehling @ Aug 13 2008, 07:24 AM) *
Scientists have the answers because they are scientists?


Biologists classify animals (a cow is still a cow no matter what genus it's in).
Paeleontologicists classify fossils (T-Rex is T-Rex regardless of who you consider its cousins to be).
Librarians classify books (Roving Mars is still Roving Mars if you put it in the science section or the biography section).

Planetary Scientists should classify planets.
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surreyguy
post Aug 13 2008, 10:05 AM
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QUOTE (djellison @ Aug 13 2008, 08:44 AM) *
Planetary Scientists should classify planets.


You'd think that would be a no-brainer, wouldn't you?

The only caution I'd have is to avoid circularity (!): you define planetary scientists as people who study planets, and then this group defines planets. For example, I would think people would count the study of asteroids and comets under planetary science (though I'd be interested to hear if people think otherwise), and you don't want to end up with a situation where yet more people feel excluded by the outcome of a definitional debate.

That said, the representation at GPD seems encouragingly broad.

Conversely, educators should decide how they will convey the science to the public (and, yes, there will be educators at GPD too - go look at the abstracts), with input, not legislation, from the scientists. I'm surprised more hasn't been made of the idea of a technical definition - for example, a strawberry is not technically a berry, and a shark is not technically a fish, and scientists and the public both seem to live happily with that.
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