Pluto the Boring Non-Planet - Sixty Symbols

I couldn't care less about the Pluto nonsense not even a planet who cares I am NOT a planetary scientist but I could not help but get swept up in the excitement it felt like such a worldwide event you know it was all over social media it was all over Twitter you could follow the spacecraft long live on NASA TV it is funny astronomy makes the news in a really disproportionate way to every other science and so actually there's always something exciting going on in Australia but yeah I think you're right that actually people have this sort of fascination with planets or not planets depending on your perspective when it comes to Pluto and so actually yes when you get to see a new world that no one's ever seen before I guess that does generate a degree of excitement that you don't get from most astronomical discoveries because it's advised exciting ISM as a little block of ice in my freezer it's just not it's not a planet it's just a rock it's not important what sites are going to learn for Pluto nothing in my opinion so it's just tibialis is just padding to the Americans well was there an American that discovered a discovered Pluto this is what I as a child of the 1980s grew up with the National Geographic picture atlas of the universe and I must have memorized most of this book this is in my childhood the best image that we have of it and the blob enos of this image is what indicated to scientists that Pluto had at least one moon do you think it's a planet I don't care I really really don't care I was actually so this was voted on by the International Astronomical Union a few years ago and I was a member of the IU and I could have - Lee gone along and cast my vote and but it why why does it matter it really doesn't matter very much right I mean Pluto still Pluto it's still the same object that it was what you choose to call it in some fairly arbitrary way is not science in any real sense of the word it's just an arbitrary definition of we'll decide this many of these ones of planets and these ones aren't so the moon is this little lump on the side and if if there's any mystery left to Pluto its how you pronounce the name of that moon because at the new horizon press conference we heard about half a different have a dozen different ways of pronouncing it so I'm going to call it Sharon because that seems to be one of the standard ways but I'm sure people will disagree with my pronunciation of that if tomorrow someone came along and said Andromeda is no longer in galaxy all the other ones we're going to call galaxies but Andromeda is going to have some new classification I can imagine you having your nose out of joint because you're into galaxies I would but the reason the only reason my nose would be out of joint is because actually there are good physical reasons why Andromeda is like in 33 and various other galaxies that there clearly is a commonality between the brain in this case it's just an arbitrary judgment call this clearly there's some kind of sliding scale between things that we call planets and things that you'd call Kuiper belt objects and Pluto is somewhere in that sort of gray area where you're going from one over two over to the other but it's which which side of that boundary you choose to name it really is completely arbitrary it's a riddle gravity maybe four percent of Earth's density less a nice mass about one-sixth of our moon core unknown what is it it's actually bad for science to get hung up on this right because actually it gives the impression that science is all about really rather subjective judgments and and arguing over over the names of things Oh arguing over classifications rather than actually understanding how planet you know the science is about how planets form and if you could show that Pluto had formed in some fundamentally different way from the other eight planets in the solar system then then I'd be very happy that really that you should give it a different name at that point but until we actually understand the science at eye level what you choose to name it really is pretty arbitrary and arguing over the name rather than arguing over how planets form is I think sort of counterproductive to science but I thought Pluto was different on the other planets isn't the argument that maybe Pluto was a captured object if we if we understood that and knew that then maybe I'd be happy to give it a different name but you know if I look through the solar system and so you know if you can play a mercury and Jupiter you know they're both planets and yet that I would say that mercury and Jupiter are more different than mercury and Pluto if you just pictures of them so why we've decided mercury and Jupiter we'll call those planets but Pluto which actually looks quite like mercury isn't the planet until you as I say until you can come up with some science behind it to justify why actually that really is a fundamentally different type of object then then just giving them different names is rather misleading because it says yes they are intrinsically different objects before we really know they are and as I say it sort of tracks from the science which is the fun bit of trying to figure out how the solar system formed in the first place and this evidence that was used against Pluto which I believe is the clearing of its orbit like it hasn't hoovered enough stuff out at all but that's needs to be what cost Pluto is planet status you don't think that science it at some level it is but Prasant you know you can look elsewhere in the solar system and you can say actually jupiter hasn't really hoovered out its orbits because that's all those Trojan asteroids which kind of more or less share Jupiter's orbit actually because you put all the massive it's sort of anchored them there so it looked like one of those examples where there was a reverse engineering a definition which allowed you to for whatever reason decide to tow wasn't a planet anymore I think what was going on is they started finding these more distant objects like areas and so on further out and there was this worry that suddenly we'd end up with the solar system with 300 planets in it which would just confuse everyone and so they wanted some definition that would allow them to cut off the solar system more or less where it was and unfortunately the definition they came up with also cut Pluto off when you're talking about particle physics you're talking about the nitty-gritty of size you know you're stripping everything back and learning about this sort of the core of things where things really come from at the most sort of raw and naked level I mean it's sort of like the ultimate truth really this is this is why particle physics is so beautiful why it's so dominated by things like symmetries and things that are so elegant good perfectly well I said historically okay we'll call the solar system everything that was discovered before 1950 you know and then Pluto would have been a planet but you know they chose not to do that and but it is just a matter of definition that does seem less scientific well yeah I guess so but except it's it's sort of more justifiable in the reaction well I guess that's reverse engineered as well as Nick just kind of get the answer you wanted but yeah it's but it's all pretty arbitrary I think the other thing that we found out in the bigger picture is the diversity of objects in our own solar system and so this idea there were nine classical planets well that that's changed dramatically over the years you know at the well at one point we thought there were 16 planets you know it just depends how you count them gives this impression that science is about stamp collecting again you know how you choose to name things and all that and the fact that it can change you know that the Buddha used to be a planet and now it isn't makes it just seem science very arbitrary and that means that when you translate that into other fields like more contentious ones like climate change and so on it gives it gives this impression that actually scientists are just making these arbitrary judgments and actually any judgment you choose to make is perfectly valid just because well my arbitrary judgment is at least as good as a scientists arbitrary judgment whereas actually you know real science isn't about that sort of stamp collecting side of things it's an important part of science but we have to collect data we have to categorize dojo and so on but if you get so hung up on the categorization that means that you're actually shortchanging the science you're not actually moving on to say to answer the interesting questions like how did the solar system form and gluto form in a different way from the rest of the solar system I think that of course it's impressive that we can though we can we have the technology to do things like that and I just don't know Pluto's where I would have gone weird you are the Nile of Saturn we just added hang around Saturn yeah they're just doing well because people have an emotional attachment to the planets they learn them in June you know in infant school they learn the names of the planets and so actually people get very upset when you suddenly say actually no that one's not a planet anymore so I think there is that sort of emotional angle to it which there isn't in most areas of science and that I don't think that's helpful to science if scientists are seem to be arguing about that it's fine it's oh you know I'm happy to argue about it over a pint of beer but it's not it shouldn't be seen as a scientific argument at that point you have a you have a son I don't know if he's going to become an astronomer or not I doubt it very much yeah what do you tell him about Pluto on the planets pretty much what I just told you actually that you know whether you choose to call our planet or not doesn't matter to Pluto Pluto still the same as it was so it really doesn't matter what you choose to call it you're like son I want you to make your own decision about the planet absolutely yeah so the astronomers know how you feel about Pluto and I don't know maybe they feel to say about pentaquarks because it's that's that Tony told me this morning he thought this visit to Pluto was incredibly boring and it's just another rocky icy thing and it's nowhere near as interesting as a lot of other stuff going on in science why is he wrong um look at look just look at that image look at the surprises that that image brought up you know this is a this is a world that is changing changeable it's got an atmosphere it has snows it has surface features it's hardly got any craters which means that that surface is somehow refreshed yes this is not something that I'm going to be writing papers about but I cannot look at that picture and and be amazed I'm team solar system I'm team solar system is turning out to be a much more interesting place than having simply nine planets that's so boring just saying oh we've got nine planets we've got a much more interesting solar system than that Pluto plays an enigmatic role in that whole system whether it's planet or not I don't think makes a difference

Channel: Sixty Symbols

Views: 187,686

Rating: 4.7349682 out of 5

Keywords: sixtysymbols, Pluto (Astronomical Discovery), Planet (Celestial Object Category), Astronomy (Field Of Study), New Horizons (Space Mission)

Id: KHeNLFGlWLA

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/nbca]

I really like Merrifield's view here. Pluto doesn't change by what box we put in, getting obsessed over whether it is or isn't a planet is not really a productive topic.

[u/[deleted]]

I think we need to try and remember who the primary consumers of the definition of 'planet' are, which is mostly school children. Prior to this definition there really was no meaningful definition of 'planet' from the scientific community. Yes, it is arbitrary, but the status quo, which wasn't really going anywhere, was worse.

Tony, however, is missing the point a bit. This is a mission to Pluto as an effort to better understand the Kuiper Belt. Comets are also "not even planets", but was Rosetta an interesting mission?