[X] My Assistant

[gpurcell]

As far as I am concerned, Pluto is still a planet and the IAU can just sod off!

They went far, far beyond the scope of their authority--to settle scientific nomenclature issues--and tried, unsuccessfully to meddle in a cultural issue.

What is particularly obnoxious is that they had a panel with folks who at least had the qualifications to address the larger issues behind the classification of Pluto...and yet the brown shirts still staged a coup and imposed their point of view in opposition to what the panel convened to advise the IAU suggested. And then hid behind "science" as a justification for their political manuevering.

'Tis a shameful chapter in the history of the IAU.

[Guest_Kevin Heider_*]

As far as I am concerned, Pluto is still a planet and the IAU can just sod off!

If that makes you happy, congratulations! But that still doesn't restore Pluto's status.

They went far, far beyond the scope of their authority--to settle scientific nomenclature issues--and tried, unsuccessfully to meddle in a cultural issue.

They were the only authority with the power to make such a change and I think they did a good job.

A year from now the public's backlash will have subsided and Alan's unofficial group (get together) will have a difficult time coming up with a good enough reason to justify overruling the IAU. Unsuccessfully trying to overrule the IAU would probably just make an even bigger joke out of professional astronomers.

I think one of the biggest mistakes was trying to make Charon a Planet. They should have been dealing with just Eris, Pluto, and Ceres. They should have left Charon in the same currently unclassified category as Sedna, Orcus, Varuna, Quaoar, 2003 EL61, 2005 FY9, Ixion, Huya, Chaos, Buffy, etc.

Charon submissively co-orbitals with Pluto. They should not have complicated the issues and emotions by trying to define a 'double planet' and thus re-classify something currently considered as a moon. This concept of keeping it simple is the reason that the current ruling only applies to our solar system.

The IAU followed the rules in place and made a democratic vote based on the members present. If members not present were really that concerned about Pluto's status, they should have made sure that they were present to cast their vote.

You can read my 1st feelings in support of the Aug 24th IAU ruling at: http://groups.google.com/group/sci.astro.a...f5f3051d7d69494

I am still glad to see that there is now a class of objects that are between irregular shaped asteroids and the dominant planets.

-- Kevin Heider

[gpurcell]

If that makes you happy, congratulations! But that still doesn't restore Pluto's status.
They were the only authority with the power to make such a change and I think they did a good job.

Nonsense. Since when does the IAU have the "power" to determine what is in the end a cultural determination?

[rogelio]

Pluto-bashers: Please note the following cultural-political-scientific consequences/implications of Pluto’s demotion:

How many people know what Eris is? (My guess: 1%) How many know that Eris is bigger than Pluto? How many know that, but for the machinations of a block within the IAU, their children would be learning that Eris is the 10th planet? That those children will vote someday (well, maybe 30% of them will) and might have voted for a candidate who would have supported the first unmannedspaceflight to the 10th planet?

[djellison]

It's getting personal in here...don't make me get out my administrative boots marked "delete" and "ban"

Doug

[Guest_Kevin Heider_*]

Nonsense. Since when does the IAU have the "power" to determine what is in the end a cultural determination?

The IAU does have the authority to decide how *most* professionals should use a term. You are right that it does not require the general public to use that definition. But I suspect in 100 years, when all of us are dead, that Pluto and his 50+ brothers will not be considered as significant as the 8 true planets.

How many people know what Eris is? (My guess: 1%) How many know that Eris is bigger than Pluto?

Most people? You mean the general public that watches reality tv? Maybe 1% of them know of an object called 'Xena' that is bigger than Pluto, and resulted in Pluto being demoted. Almost no-one knows what Eris is. Hopefully 99% of the 'reality tv' group can do single digit arithmetic.

If scientists were announcing a new planet evey year the general public would grow bored very quickly. How many people really care if a new galaxy is discovered at the edge of the current known universe?

Eris will be mentioned as the largest 'dwarf planet' in the chapter labeled 'dwarf planets'.

I still think the term Planet should be truly reserved for the large dominant bodies.

-- Kevin Heider

[JRehling]

They were the only authority with the power to make such a change

On the hierarchy of organizations with power to suppress public sentiment (should they end up in opposition), the IAU ranks pretty low.

Dictionaries also apply definitions to words, and don't have less authority than scientific boards. "Star" still means, among other things, any pointlike light in the sky. Physics owns one definition of "work" and astronomy owns one definition of "star", but they don't own all of them. "Work" is going to continue to have senses that cannot be measured in newtons, "star" is going to continue to have senses that don't require fusion, and "planet" is going to continue to be applied to Pluto.

In most cases, there's some sort of inertia going on to keep committees from owning words. "Star" maintains its any-point-light-in-the-sky meaning for reasons that stem naturally from the phenomenology of vision. Pluto's planetness has and will continue to have a sort of guerrilla support. A certain segment going all the way to the top, professionally, is going to insist on that.

Committees can add to the dictionaries' list of definitions, but they don't have "delete power". Pluto's going to stay a planet... it's just a matter of which definition. If need be, we'll have a definition that includes the moving stars known to the ancients (that's in the dictionaries now); the (possibly mutable) definition of the IAU; and a definition that includes Pluto and probably Eris. If someone figures out a way to get "delete power" over definitions, I'd like to know what it is.

[Greg Hullender]

Been a while since High School, I gather. :-) Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is more fun than being able to tell an adult "you're wrong!" (Respectfully, of course.) :-)

--Greg (Class of 1977, so it's been a while for me too actually)

[JRehling]

Been a while since High School, I gather. :-) Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is more fun than being able to tell an adult "you're wrong!" (Respectfully, of course.) :-)

--Greg (Class of 1977, so it's been a while for me too actually)

I taught high school... and undergraduates. But since when do rebels clamor for maintaining the status quo as it's printed in their books?

Nobody arguing for any of the respective definitions has a higher degree than I do. I'm not any more junior to them than Ben Franklin was to George III.

Well, I'm sure many of them are older than I, but not all.

It's not age nor rank nor slogans that makes anyone right here, though: it's being right. "Planet" isn't any more amenable to or needful of formal definition than "river", and nothing in 2006 changed that. As to how much sway the right answer will end up having, that's always a good question.

[Stephen]

If that doesn't stop them in their tracks, keep going with "And by the way, when does a pile of dirt and rock go from being a pile to a mound, and then into a hill? And exactly what is the difference between a hill and a mountain anyway? And don't try to tell me mountains have rocky tops, have you taken a good look in New England lately? And why is there a mountain range called the Blue Hills?"

When I did geography in high school--a discipline, BTW, which has apparently been abolished from school curricula, at least in Australia--the term "mountain" had a formal definition: it was a peak 3000 feet or over. Anything under that was a mere hill.

But that was the geographers' definition. Most other people knew nothing about such technicalities--or if they did (eg the cartographers responsible for drawing the maps with all those "Mount X's" sprinkled across them) they happily ignored them--and had been happily applying the words "mount"and "mountain" (not to mention combinations like "mountain range") to heights well under 3000 feet.

Frankly I intend to apply the same principle to "planet": I shall ignore the edicts of the IAU and continue to use the word "planet" rather than "dwarf planet" for Pluto. IAU members may feel themselves under some kind of obligation to adhere, but AFAIK the IAU does not have copyright or trademark control of the word so that means the rest of us are free to do as we see fit. If the Academie Francaise cannot stop the French public using Franglais I'd like to see the IAU stop English-speakers using the word "planet" for Pluto.

======
Stephen

[JRehling]

When I did geography in high school--a discipline, BTW, which has apparently been abolished from school curricula, at least in Australia--the term "mountain" had a formal definition: it was a peak 3000 feet or over. Anything under that was a mere hill.

This case has more thorny issues than just the height cutoff. For example, on a plain nearly universally 2990 feet above sea level, is a ten-foot bump a mountain? On a craggy surface that is around 4000' feet high, which points are recognized as independent peaks -- there could potentially be thousands of local maxima or an almost unlimited number if you recognize the fractal surface of the rock. So not only height, but some things like convexity and spatial frequency also have to be formalized. I think the "formal" approach with mountains is to use a well-defined cutoff for height but to be completely you-know-it-when-you-see-it with regards to what is a peak.

There's a joke that ends with, "We've already established what you are; now we're negotiating the price." So we've already agreed that you know a mountain when you see it; now we're trying to limit the degrees of ambiguity from five to four.

[Greg Hullender]

A point worth mentioning for the benefit of the "planet is a cultural term" crowd: we are talking about only eight objects (no more than 100 max) at the moment. Equating this issue with rivers or mountains, which exist by the thousands, if not tens of thousands, is not credible. Further, the general public has far, far more contact with a variety of mountains and rivers, and the distinction between those and "hill" and "stream" is likewise far more important to the average joe (who might need to cross one), and thus, far more likely to genuinely have a "cultural" component. For "planet" vs. "moon" or "dwarf planet" or whatever, the impact on the average person (as opposed to the specialist) is nothing more significant than winning or losing a point in Trivial Pursuit.

So I'd say, no, you have not proven your case that "planet" is a "cultural term." Planets are squarely in the realm of science. No one else really cares.

--Greg

[nprev]

Ye gods...gotta tell ya, I'm about ready to call the Jerry Springer Show & just have us all do a free-for-all while the studio audience chants for more!

Well, we're all humans, with human perceptions, opinions, and emotions. Beginning to think that that only truly unambiguous categories of objects in the Universe are hadrons & leptons! (Well, quarks, too, of course...)

Heck, maybe that isn't funny...I might be right!!! The other extreme would be black holes...

[JRehling]

A point worth mentioning for the benefit of the "planet is a cultural term" crowd: we are talking about only eight objects (no more than 100 max) at the moment. Equating this issue with rivers or mountains, which exist by the thousands, if not tens of thousands, is not credible.

That's a difference, but why is it a relevant difference? I see no reason why there being fewer of them makes them not "cultural". Stars outnumber (terrestrial) mountains. Galaxies outnumber (terrestrial) rivers. Does that make galaxies more or less cultural than rivers, or is number irrelevant to the matters at hand?

Of course, we could talk about continents, which number roughly the same as planets, and the continent-ness of Europe and the non-continentness of India.

Further, the general public has far, far more contact with a variety of mountains and rivers, and the distinction between those and "hill" and "stream" is likewise far more important to the average joe (who might need to cross one), and thus, far more likely to genuinely have a "cultural" component. For "planet" vs. "moon" or "dwarf planet" or whatever, the impact on the average person (as opposed to the specialist) is nothing more significant than winning or losing a point in Trivial Pursuit.

There is no question that geography intrudes on the consciousness of the layfolk more than astronomy.

However, the term "planet" also has a tenuous association with science. And as a preamble, let's not confuse the objects in question with the term. Scientists do science concerning Mars; that does not mean that all of the words used in discussions of Mars are scientific terms, much less that they are all amenable to formal definition.

1) Since Bode's Law has ceased to be serious science, the term "planet" has not held for scientists any significant distinction vs. the bodies just smaller than planets. This isn't like "fungus" and "plant" or "baryon" and "lepton" or "DNA" and "RNA". No natural distinction has been meant, needed, or detected. Unlike the other examples I presented in the previous sentence, it is unimaginable that the revelation that something once thought to be a planet and then discovered to be just barely too small (or vice versa) would have any consequence for one's understanding of that object's place in the natural world. In this way, the distinction is quite like that between "river" and "stream".

And by any standards, the comparison between the Mercury-Jupiter similarity and the Mercury-Ceres suggests a category boundary drawn for historic, not scientific, reasons. M::C is more similar in size, composition, structure, etc., than M::J. Originally, Mercury and Jupiter shared naked-eye visibilty and motion and nothing else.

The term "planet" is USED by scientists, but it is not a scientific term any more than "Star Wars" is a scientific movie.

2) Even so, if the term belongs to anyone, it would be the middlebrow "users" that talk about it the most: museums, PBS specials, grade schools, cinematic fiction about spacefarers, and casual readers of newspapers.

There are about 10,000 IAU members. There are, in the developed world, no less than a billion non-astronomers. I would fearlessly posit that the term "planet" is cumulatively used far more often by the billion than the ten thousand: they only need to mention it 1/100,000th as often to do so. If a layperson hears the term once a year, then the average astronomer would need to hear it every 3 waking minutes to make up the gap. Even before acknowledging that many astronomers concentrate on larger things than planets, this seems exceedingly unlikely.

So I'd say, no, you have not proven your case that "planet" is a "cultural term." Planets are squarely in the realm of science. No one else really cares.

--Greg

Quite the opposite. The Google query "Pluto is still a planet" garners considerably more hits than the IAU has members. People with no college education have brought the subject of Pluto up with me. Newsweek had a cover story about it. There is far more cumulative eyeball-time coming from laypersons than professionals.

If we were talking about neutron stars or Oberon, the opposite might be true, but with Pluto, it's no contest.

The real measure here is how often do we have scientists using the term with scientific significance, on the one hand, vs. scientists using the term in a vague and offhand way PLUS laypersons using the term in a vague and offhand way. There's really no comparison. Since the asteroids and Pluto were used as data regarding Bode's Law, the term has not had a scientific role. For what it's worth, Icarus no longer accepts submissions on the topic of Bode's Law.

[gpurcell]

The real issue I see here is a fundamental misuse of science.

The question "What is a planet?" is not a scientific question! There is no Platonic "planetness" out there which can serve as a referent. Any "tests for planetness" are simply an application of more-or-less arbitrary boundary conditions.

What bothers me so much about this is that we see scientists, who for various reasons believe something, employ an argument from authority as opposed to a scientific inquiry on the subject. Of course, they have to do this--a scientific inquiry into the meaningness of the word "planet" would quickly descend into philosophy.

Anytime, anytime I see argument from authority it makes me question the agenda and motives of those making the spurious call. It is particularly obnoxious in science because the whole point of the enterprise is that truth claims can be tested without reference to the individual making the claim.

If an astrobiologist claims that certain tests prove life on Ganymede, the testing procedure can be examined and duplicated. Independent inquiry will settle the truth value of the claim.

THERE IS NO TRUTH VALUE TO THE IAU'S POSITION. IT CANNOT BE TESTED. It is SIMPLY a statement of opinion...and the underhanded and devious manner with which it was arrived at suggests, strongly, that the motives behind those pushing the demotion of Pluto are not good.