Ian Stocks, Clemson University
The following comment was not sent directly to me but was posted to “Dome-L,” an Internet chat group that serves planetarium professionals. The fellow reflects on the planetarium community’s resistance to our museum’s treatment of Pluto on the grounds that it was against IAU proclamation; but after the IAU officially demoted Pluto, the same community continued to object, this time ignoring the IAU. Behavior such as this betrays hidden biases that do not tend to be subject to rational argument.
Date: August 31, 2006 3:36:12 PM EDT
To: Dome-L
Pardon my insolence, but I’m mighty amused at some of the responses to the IAU’s decision. Particularly, I’m quite tickled that some of the most irate are the same people who decried Neil Tyson when he omitted Pluto from the solar system exhibit at AMNH.
Isn’t it an odd twist that those who derided Tyson for flying in the face of Pluto’s planetary status as granted by the IAU by omitting it (then) are the very same who are now assuring all who’ll listen that they’ll still be referring to Pluto as a planet in their planetarium programs!
Seems a bit hypocritical to me….
Michael J. Narlock
Some people got a bit carried away in their anti-Pluto enthusiasm:
Date: August 27, 2006 2:48:26 PM EDT
F##k pluto, it was a sorry excuse for a planet anyhow, good riddance to bad solar trash, but now that the name is free, why not rename Uranus Pluto and get rid of all that grade school snickering.
Howard Brenner
Others took the occasion to lambaste the negotiating talents of well-meaning scientists:
Date: 07:40 AM 8/27/2006:
This whole issue is a marvelous example of why scientists/technocrats generally make poor politicians.
Dave Herald, Canberra, Australia
Meanwhile, surface mail continued. Angry third graders from the year 2000 were now in high school, with other (hormonal) priorities to distract them. But, as already noted, there’s always a new crop of elementary schoolers to fill that void. In a stack of letters addressed to me from Mrs.
Debbie Dalton’s third-grade class in the Warren L. Miller Elementary School, in Mansfield, Pennsylvania, Emerson York expresses their sentiment best, complete with seven exclamation marks to end the letter, followed by an illustration of a teary-eyed Pluto (Figure 6.3).
One of my favorites of the angry-kid genre arrived from Madeline Trost, of Plantation, Florida, and was mailed on September 19, 2006. After addressing the envelope to me personally, she bluntly addresses her letter “Dear Scientest” (Figure 6.4), and she can’t contain her flurry of assaults on my integrity, ending with an appeal to accommodate a short-coming of her own. I received another angry letter from a kid, except this one was a little older. As a card-carrying member of the American Museum of Natural History, she also felt comfortable schooling me in Plutonian mythology (Figure 6.5).
For newspaper articles, journalists hardly ever get to title their own piece. That task usually goes to someone else in the back office. For Pluto and its demotion, the urge to compose an attention-getting headline that poked fun at the entire episode was irresistible—especially for the tabloids. Ones that rise above others include the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Planned Planethood” on August 16, 2006. Meanwhile, with the fresh memory of miscounted ballots in Florida during the hotly contested presidential elections of 2000, the St. Petersburg Times carried the headline “Pluto’s Hanging Chad” on August 22, 2006.
Those were the real headlines.
In a parody of The New York Times’ page 1, The People’s Cube (ThePeoplesCube.com) ran a series of Pluto-inspired headlines (accompanied by illegible columns of text) that mirror prevailing political and cultural sentiments in America. Dated August 26, 2006, the page begins with:
Figure 6.3. Letter from Emerson York.
Figure 6.4. Letter from Madeline Trost.
Figure 6.5. Letter from Diane Kline.
THE NEW YORK TIMES: PLUTO CRISIS EDITION
We quickly see residual anti-Islamic sentiment from September 11, 2001.
MUSLIM PROTESTERS BURN LOCAL PLANETARIUM “JUST IN CASE”
We then learn that Congress might have had something to do with the demotion.
LACK OF FEDERAL FUNDING LEADS TO DOWNSIZING OF SOLAR SYSTEM
And we further learn the potential impact of Pluto’s demotion elsewhere in the galaxy.
PLUTO DECISION SENDS SHOCKWAVES TO NEIGHBORING SOLAR SYSTEMS
The news of the day would not be complete without partisan politics
REPUBLICANS DENY AID TO PLUTO AMIDST GROWING CONCERNS FOR THE FUTURE OF TRANS-NEPTUNIAN OBJECTS
CAN PLUTO OUSTING HELP DEMOCRATS WIN ELECTIONS? AL GORE DEMANDS A RECOUNT OF ASTEROIDS
and Bush accusations.
NASA: BUSH KNEW ABOUT PLUTO’S INSUFFICIENT GRAVITY: ORDER TO “OUT” PLUTO MAY HAVE COME FROM KARL ROVE
America’s strained relations with Venezuela did not go unnoticed either.
HUGO CHAVEZ PLEDGES TO SEND OIL TO PLUTO
You can never ignore any part of the Middle East.
IRAN PRESIDENT DEFENDS PLUTO, THREATENS TO RETALIATE AGAINST ISRAEL
HAMAS LEADERS TO APPEAL TO UN AS SOON AS THEY FIND OUT WHAT PLUTO IS
HEZBOLLAH CLAIMS ROCKETS CAN NOW REACH PLUTO
There’s immigration-inspired politics, too.
MCCAIN TO GRANT PLANETARY STATUS TO ASTEROIDS IF ELECTED
And persistent claims of discrimination.
“BIG-PLANETISM” RAMPANT AT NATIONAL OBSERVATORIES: WHISTLEBLOWER UNCOVERS BIAS TOWARDS SMALLER, “FEMALE” PLANETS
Related, but smaller headlines follow.
REPUBLICANS SHRUG OFF GLASS CEILING FOR DWARFS, ASTEROIDS
POLL: MOST AMERICANS THINK THAT BLACK HOLES ARE DISCRIMINATED AGAINST
PLUTO RULING ANGERS DWARVES, MIDGETS: CLASS ACTION “DWARF TOSSING” LAWSUIT FILED
These headlines are not simply parodies of news but mirrors to the mores of modern America.
Newspapers also serve as the daily repository of public sentiment through their op-ed pages and their letters to the editor. In the Houston Chronicle of September 3, 2006, Randi Light wrote: “Pluto was voted out as a planet by a group of astronomers. But I’ve heard that Pluto will run as an independent now.” The Oregonian from the same day printed a rhyme by Mike Malter, of Southwest Portland:
Dear Pluto,
The news is quite bad
Your recent demotion so sad
Earth scientists morphed you
They downsized and “dwarfed” you
Little buddy, I think you’ve been had.
Deeply concerned for the demise of America, Gene Lolnowski, of Ellicottt City, Maryland, wrote in the August 31, 2006, USA Today: “Our traditional values in this country are taking a big enough beating, and now the IAU wants to mess around with the traditional organization of the solar system. When is this going to stop? This Pluto decision must be reversed. Tradition must prevail.”
Deeply concerned for Pluto’s emotional stability, Marla Warren, from Bartonville, Illinois, wrote in the New York Times of August 28, 2006: “I can accept the rationale for stripping Pluto of its planet status. But was it necessary to stigmatize Pluto with a negative label about its appearance? Calling any heavenly body ‘dwarf’ could very well damage its self-esteem. I propose a more positive classification; for example, assistant planet, apprentice planet or, perhaps, training planet.”
In spite of widespread accusations to the contrary, I had no vested interest in the outcome of the IAU vote. As already noted, the solar system exhibits at the museum’s $230 million Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City did not organize objects by whether or not they were formally classified as planets. So the design and concept was largely immune to what was decided in Prague.
I remind the reader that the IAU does not normally vote on scientific concepts, heated or otherwise. Voting typically addresses non-controversial t
hings like nomenclature that clarifies or unifies our means of communicating with one another. Science is not a democracy. As is often cited (and attributed to Galileo), the stated authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Yet the IAU’s vote to demote Pluto sure looked like an attempt at democracy. Immediately following the vote, many in the planetary science community protested. Some did so on grounds that the 424 voting astrophysicists could not possibly represent the 2,000+ astrophysicists who attended the conference or the 10,000+ world membership of the IAU. Others complained about the limited time made available for the community to mull over the draft resolutions.
Still others—actually, the effort was led by Mark Sykes (see Figure 4.8)—instantly circulated an online petition to allow the international community of scientists to protest the IAU vote if they chose to do so. Reprinted in its entirety below, the petition’s text was a model of simplicity:34
PETITION PROTESTING THE IAU PLANET DEFINITION
We, as planetary scientists and astronomers, do not agree with the IAU’s definition of a planet, nor will we use it. A better definition is needed.
Open to signatures for the five days that followed the IAU vote, 304 scientists joined the list. The next day, August 31, 2006, the petitioners issued a press release with a swords-drawn opening line:
Sufficient signatures from planetary scientists and astronomers have been gathered to bring into serious question the definition for planet adopted by the IAU as fundamentally flawed, as was the process by which it was generated.
After a long paragraph citing the impressive planetary pedigree of the signers, the press release called for a new, grassroots, inclusive effort to establish the definition of a planet. The process would culminate in a conference, “not to determine a winner, but to acknowledge a consensus.” The release was signed by Arizona’s Planetary Science Institute and Colorado’s Southwest Research Institute.
Who knows what will ultimately become of this petition? More people voted against Pluto at the 2006 IAU Prague assembly than signed the petition itself. Of widespread concern to the petitioners was that 424 voting attendees amounted to a mere 4 percent of the world’s astrophysicists, so how could the tally possibly represent the informed judgments of the entire community? On the surface, this argument sounds convincing, but most pollsters would give their eyeteeth for their sample to represent 4 percent of a complete population.
So the question should instead be, What are the chances that the vote would be substantially different if you polled all the world’s astrophysicists? It turns out, if you do the math, that the vote’s margin of uncertainty is less than 3 percent, which means that there is a 95 percent (2 sigma, in statistical parlance) chance that if the entire population were polled, the vote would fall within 3 percent of the tally obtained in Prague. The calculation assumes that the 424 scientists are a random sample. There is no reason to presume otherwise, except that people who favor Pluto’s planethood typically exhibit more energy for their cause than Pluto demoters exhibit for theirs. So the 90 percent who voted for demotion may actually be lower than what one might expect for the entire population.
Here’s another way to look at the problem: Suppose the people who signed the petition do not overlap at all with the 10 percent of the 424 who voted for Pluto’s planet status in Prague. This is certainly not the case, but it offers an important, extreme view on what the numbers can tell us. Only 42 people voted for Pluto in Prague. Add that to the 304 who signed the petition, and we get about 350 professional Pluto-is-a-planet supporters worldwide. This figure is a mere 3.5 percent of the world’s astrophysicists. Of course, not voting for something is not the same as voting against it. Most astrophysicists probably don’t care enough about the problem to express an opinion at all. As suggested in Chapter 2, where I chronicle Pluto’s disproportionate grip on the hearts and souls of the American public, the effect seems to be true for professionals as well. No more than 20 signers of Sykes’s petition (about 6 percent), which circulated internationally, hailed from non-American institutions. Yet non-Americans comprise more than two-thirds of the IAU membership.35
This analysis notwithstanding, rather than pit petitions against votes, what should happen, and what Sykes calls for, is the search for consensus. And until one is obtained, nobody should be defining anything.
7
Pluto the Dwarf Planet
THE WORLD COULD NOT STOP REACTING TO PLUTO’S new dwarf planet status. As though August 25, 2006, the day after the International Astronomical Union’s vote, heralded a new zero point on the planetary calendar, giving us BD (Before Dwarf) for all dates prior and AD (After Dwarf) for all dates afterward.
After the IAU vote, Bill Nye immediately returned to my e-mail in-box with further critical observations of the way things were going:
The current International Astronomical Union (IAU) proposal to refer to Pluto as a “dwarf planet” will not be useful, because the word “planet” appears in a designation that is intended to explain that bodies like Pluto are not planets—a remarkable failure of a committee trying perhaps to please too many people.
Bill was not alone in his sentiment, although this widespread meaning was not the committee’s intent. They added the word “dwarf” the way astrophysicists have used it for dwarf galaxy (which is still a galaxy) and for dwarf star (which is still a star). But to no avail. As far as anyone was concerned, the IAU killed planet Pluto.
During the demotion commotion, singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton posted an ode to Pluto as sung by a loving Charon, titled “I’m Your Moon” (see complete lyrics in Appendix C).36 The song opens with reference to Pluto’s lack of a ring system. While not a criterion for planethood, Coulton was just warming up:
They invented a reason.
That’s why it stings.
They don’t think you matter
Because you don’t have pretty rings.
He then poetically indicts the cavalier behavior of warring astronomers:
Let them shuffle the numbers.
Watch them come and go.
We’re the ones who are out here,
Out past the edge of what they know.
The refrain captures the important fact that among moons in the solar system, Charon and Pluto come closest to each other in size, allowing Charon to affectionately think of Pluto as its moon too:
I’m your moon.
You’re my moon.
We go round and round.
From out here,
It’s the rest of the world
That looks so small.
Amid the romance, Coulton offers a blunt reality check:
Sad excuse for a sunrise.
It’s so cold out here.
Icy silence and dark skies
As we go round another year.
My favorite part of the song resembles what might transpire in a self-help therapy session:
Promise me you will always remember
Who you are.
Who you were.
Long before they said you were no more.
These are surely the most sensitive words ever shared between two inanimate cosmic objects.
In another Pluto-inspired song, going by the plain and simple title of “Pluto’s Not a Planet Anymore” (for complete lyrics, see Appendix D), Jeff Mondak collaborated with Alex Stangl.37 Mr. Mondak lives in Champaign, Illinois, where he is a children’s poet and songwriter and a professor at the University of Illinois. Mr. Stangl lives in Peterborough, Ontario, where he is a singer, songwriter, musician, and music producer. This duo had collaborated on several songs before. They wrote and composed “Pluto’s Not a Planet Anymore” on the suggestion of students at Barkstall Elementary School, in Champaign.
The song is upbeat, invokes catchy phrases, and revisits the line “Pluto’s Not a Planet Anymore” enough times that you can just hear a classroom of kids belting it out in unified chorus. Here are my two favorite stanzas:
Uranus may be famous
>
But Mercury’s feeling hot
For Pluto was a planet,
And somehow now it’s not
Neptune’s nervous, Saturn’s sad,
And jumpin’ Jupiter is hoppin’ mad
Eight remain of nine we had
Pluto’s not a planet anymore
The song ends with a clever, simple rhyme:
They met in Prague and voted
Now Pluto’s been demoted
Oh, Pluto’s not a planet anymore
Apart from songwriters inspired by personified dwarf planets, the next best sign that an obscure subject, or any subject at all, has entered the realm of pop culture is when that same subject becomes comedic fodder for humorists. A joke is funny only when everybody already knows the foundations of its content, allowing the writer to offer fresh comedic vistas without the burden of establishing context. Is there anything knee-slapping about the planet Mercury? Or Neptune? Or Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the Sun? Can’t say I’ve ever heard a joke about any of them. But what humorist could possibly resist the parody of learned scientists carrying on like children as they argue about Pluto’s status? And be they humorists or not, who could resist the playful personification of Pluto: simultaneously a planet, a nonplanet, a dog, an underdog, and an ice ball?
Figure 7.1. Political cartoonist Bob Englehart, of the Hartford Courant , chose to exploit the “farthest planet” contest by making a larger political statement.
As we have already seen with media headlines, Pluto’s demotion became a window on who and what we are as a culture, blending themes drawn from party politics, social protest, celebrity worship, economic indicators, academic dogma, education policy, social bigotry, and jingoism.
The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet Page 10