The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet by Neil deGrasse Tyson
It’s been a tough ride on the roller coaster for Pluto. Once the favorite planet of children, now ingominiously referred to as a dwarf planet, the status of Pluto had become something of an astronomer’s political football a few years back. In a day and age when we’re supersizing our meals, we are downsizing planets. How this came to be is richly detailed, albeit somewhat one-sidedly, in Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s very entertaining and informative book entitled The Pluto Files:The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet.
It is a very aptly titled book. It’s irreverent, funny and enlightening. It is also a great example of how science can be discussed on a layman’s level. Tyson’s sense of humor and pugnacious spirit shows on every page in clearly written prose. If it’s something you need to know to understand the topic, Tyson is very able to explain it in a way you can understand.
Covering the history of Pluto from the early search for Planet X through it’s status today, the book provides an interesting introduction to science in the public sphere. Tyson includes a lot of material on the place of Pluto in the nation’s consciousness and and why he believes that the Pluto debate captured the public’s attention as strongly as it did, generating such strong opinions from both sides, but especially from the pro-Pluto sentimentalists.
You do sense that he dismisses his own role in the shrinking of Pluto from full planetary status to dwarf planet, while at the same time he takes credit for starting the process and carrying the battle forward. He wants both to press the challenge and remain humbly in the background of the fray. It’s a bit disingenuous. After reading this book you’ll not likely find anything humble in Tyson.
Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and an Astrophysicist, which is the big and appropriately accurate name for an astronomer these days. His role in this story really began when an page-one article appeared in the New York Times that declared that the Hayden Planetarium had demoted Pluto from it’s vaunted planetary status and lumped it together with other, smaller objects of the solar system. It was a rocket ride downward for Pluto after that.
So what’s the deal? First, we’ve found that Pluto is quite small compared to the other eight planets of the 9-planet pantheon. Also, it has an orbit crowded with debris and rubble, unlike the other 8 planets. It’s not like the rocky inner group of Mercury, Venus, Earth or Mars, nor is it like the giant gaseous planets composed of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus.
The other planets have “cleared” their orbits. The orbits of the Big Eight are free of the rocky clutter we find in the asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, or in the Kuiper Belt (that’s pronounced like Kiper or Kyper, with a long “i” sound) in which Pluto floats for most of its orbit. If that rocky clutter were cleared by having been assimilated into Pluto’s own planetary mass, I suppose that it would re-attain its Planetary status. But don’t hold your breath. That won’t happen in our life times.
Now we have an interesting challenge facing our authors of books on the Solar System. Do we say we have eight planets, excluding those diminutive dwarfs? Or do we say that planetary status isn’t an either/or proposition. Do we take the fuzzy set theory approach and say that Pluto isn’t exactly non-planet. It has too many planetary features. Wouldn’t that be why we call it a dwarf planet? After all, its not lumpy and craggy like an asteroid.
Books seem to be taking both tacks with the planetary situation. Many, you’ll find, refer to the eight planets, and the growing number of dwarf planets. Others keep the planetary count increasing, with the 4 medium sized rocky planets of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, the 4 giant gaseous planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, the ever increasing number of dwarf planets, with Ceres, hidden in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, and Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris away way way out there in the Kuiper Belt beyond Uranus.
So why all this fuss, anyway? Well, spend some time with scientists and you’ll find that many just like to fuss. Science, as long as there are scientists, will be full of fussing. But lots of fussing has its well argued reasons.
Classifying things is an essential component of science. It assists us in saying Thing A is like Thing B, but it’s not like Thing C. This means we can expect Thing A to exhibit Thing B characteristics, but not Thing C characteristics. Grouping things by characteristics of similarity, or degrees of similarity helps us be precise in our understanding.
I’ll take a biological example, for instance, that is easy to understand. There are two types of bacteria. We can classify them as Gram-positive or Gram-negative, after the color they turn when they are stained by the Gram Staining process (named after Gram, don’t ya know). They show up different color under the microscope.
Well, those Gram-negative bacteria are more like each other than they are like Gram-positive bacteria, because of their cell walls which influence they response to Gram staining. That similarity is very important when selecting which antibiotic you prescribe. Some kill Gram-negative, and don’t’ bother Gram-positive bacteria, and others kill Gram-positive bacteria but don’t harm Gram-negative. It’s nice if your doctor knows which is which when prescribing. Generally, he or she does, since most of your ear infections, and so on, are of one type.
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July 15th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
It is important to note that Tyson has distanced himself from the controversial 2006 IAU decision, which he himself admits is flawed. At this point, he even admits that the debate is not over, that it might be too early in the study of planetary scientists for anyone to be defining what a planet is in the first place. This was pretty much his message at the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, which he moderated at the American Museum of Natural History on March 10, 2009.
Significantly, only four percent of the IAU voted on Pluto’s demotion, and most are not planetary scientists. Their decision was immediately rejected by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto.
This debate is far from over. For another perspective, anyone interested in this topic should read “Is Pluto A Planet” by Dr. David Weintraub. Also, please visit my Pluto blog, which discusses the scientific reasons for Pluto maintaining its planet status and chronicles worldwide efforts to overturn the demotion, at http://laurele.livejournal.com
July 15th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
It is important to note that Tyson has distanced himself from the controversial 2006 IAU decision, which he himself admits is flawed. At this point, he even admits that the debate is not over, that it might be too early in the study of planetary scientists for anyone to be defining what a planet is in the first place. This was pretty much his message at the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, which he moderated at the American Museum of Natural History on March 10, 2009.
Significantly, only four percent of the IAU voted on Pluto’s demotion, and most are not planetary scientists. Their decision was immediately rejected by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto.
This debate is far from over. For another perspective, anyone interested in this topic should read “Is Pluto A Planet” by Dr. David Weintraub and the soon to be released “The Case for Pluto” by Alan Boyle.
The IAU definition makes no sense in stating that dwarf planets are not planets at all and in classifying objects solely by where they are while ignoring what they are. If Earth were in Pluto’s orbit, according to the IAU definition, it would not be a planet either. The situation could be easily remedied by amending the IAU resolution to make dwarf planets a subclass of planets referring to objects that are large enough to be pulled into a spherical shape by their own gravity but not large enough to gravitationally dominate their orbits.
July 17th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Laurel, thanks for the comments. I think you are only partially correct, though, when you say
There will be a fight, no matter what.
From a layperson’s perspective, i.e. my own, I wonder what effect all this discussion will have on the public’s interest in astronomy and science, in general? For myself, I’m interested. I can see merit in both sides’ arguments. But for a lot of teachers and the kids in their classrooms, I think that the back-and-forth of this disagreement will result in lowered interest and confusion.
I recently reviewed an excellent fiction book by Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy titled “Georges Secret Key to the Universe” that treated the planetary debate as settled, with Pluto as a big TNO. If the classification changes again, we’ll have all sorts of material like this book that generate lots of conflicting information. Not the sort of thing your typical elementary teacher is able, or inclined, to sift through with their students.