[X] My Assistant

[JRehling]

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.

This aspect of it, quite apart from any specific worlds we are talking about, bothers me a great deal and I think loses scientists a lot of "capital" in terms of winning the masses over to a greater interest in science.

A particularly annoying (though brief) moment in my own education that I recall: An English teacher was talking about a mirror (which I imagine was mentioned in a story; that, I don't recall) and asked the class: "What does a mirror do?" He got several answers: "They reflect light." (Teacher shakes his head 'no'.) "They create an image of something else." (Teacher shakes his head 'no'.) "They create a reverse image of something else." (Teacher shakes his head 'no'.) After everyone with gumption had given up, the teacher let a silence hang in the air for a while. Then he said, "Nothing. A mirror does nothing."

Well, he was free to go ahead and make whatever point he was making, but overall, that minute of classtime was an exercise in jackassery on his part. The real upshot was that no matter how valid an answer was, he was going to shake his head 'no' and stymie everyone before giving his answer, which wasn't any better than anyone else's. At worst, his answer was technically wrong. At best, it was one of several valid answers. But given the moment and his magisterial status (and his generally antisocial personality), he was determined to shoot everyone else down.

The greatest disservice that teacher did was to teachers who actually had a REASON for saying some answers were right and some wrong.

And that's what we have with the 2006 IAU definition. The public is being told that scientists know best (which in many cases they do) when this is really an aesthetic matter and at BEST is an arbitrary selection being introduced for the purpose of adopting some standard, any standard. At worst, it's an arbitrary selection being introduced out of a slavish adherence to aristotelian categories that are vertically hierarchical while mutually exclusive within the same level of the tree -- an assumption that everyone knows does not work well in many cases.

This spends goodwill capital that burns up a little of the eagerness the public might have for enjoying this interesting subject matter, all for the no-gain adoption of a formal definition for which it is inconceivable that science will profit. (Can we imagine riddles of the formation of the asteroids that were once hard to understand but are now laid bare by clarity regarding Ceres's category? Not possibly.) Lose-lose. This would all be true even if Pluto had never existed.