from the mars-and-saturn-lodge-complaints dept.
The internet is abuzz with rumors that Pluto may rejoin the official list of Planets around the Sun. Scientific American lists some new findings supporting Pluto's planetary status, including a Methane atmosphere and a new (larger) estimate of its diameter.
The Real fireworks, however, are political. According to USA Today the real issue is a turf battle in the IAU between Owen Gingerich, the chair of the IAU Planet Definition Committee, and Gareth Williams, associate director of the IAU's Minor Planet Center. At least they're not being secretive about it; the two of them took to the stage on September 18th 2014 and had a public debate on the topic. The sticking point for the Minor Planet Center is that the current IAU definition requires a planet to have "cleared its neighborhood", which Pluto has not (it crosses orbits with Neptune).
Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, offered a third opinion in the debate from an Exoplanet researcher's perspective. Sasselov argued that the IAU's definition of planet also requires orbit around our sun, with the ridiculous conclusion that none of the exoplanets we've discovered are actually planets. He then suggested a new definition that laid aside the Sol-specific and cleared-neighborhood requirements. The audience full of Harvard students voted to accept this definition and reinstate Pluto as a planet. It remains to be seen whether the results of this debate swayed the minds and hearts of the Minor Planet Center or the IAU as a whole.
The full debate can be seen on the Youtube channel ObsNights.
I think my favorite commentary on this comes from IanHoppe of AL.com:
I'd like to take a moment to say that this discussion is not a point against the scientific enterprise. Rather, this search for distinct and specific definitions is part of the exercise of good science. We'll sort all of this out eventually. It may just mean the reprinting of textbooks. Again. In other news: Pluto is a dark, frozen rock in the outer recesses of our solar system and does not care in the least how we classify it.
Related Stories
Pluto a Planet? New Research from UCF Suggests Yes
The reason Pluto lost its planet status is not valid, according to new research from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union, a global group of astronomy experts, established a definition of a planet that required it to "clear" its orbit, or in other words, be the largest gravitational force in its orbit. [...] [Philip] Metzger, who is lead author on the study, reviewed scientific literature from the past 200 years and found only one publication -- from 1802 -- that used the clearing-orbit requirement to classify planets, and it was based on since-disproven reasoning.
[...] The planetary scientist said that the literature review showed that the real division between planets and other celestial bodies, such as asteroids, occurred in the early 1950s when Gerard Kuiper published a paper that made the distinction based on how they were formed. However, even this reason is no longer considered a factor that determines if a celestial body is a planet, Metzger said.
[...] Instead, Metzger recommends classifying a planet based on if it is large enough that its gravity allows it to become spherical in shape. "And that's not just an arbitrary definition, Metzger said. "It turns out this is an important milestone in the evolution of a planetary body, because apparently when it happens, it initiates active geology in the body." Pluto, for instance, has an underground ocean, a multilayer atmosphere, organic compounds, evidence of ancient lakes and multiple moons, he said. "It's more dynamic and alive than Mars," Metzger said. "The only planet that has more complex geology is the Earth."
Planet Ceres, please.
The Reclassification of Asteroids from Planets to Non-Planets (DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2018.08.026) (DX)
Related: Pluto May Regain Status as Planet
Earth is a "Dwarf Planet" Because it has not Cleared its Orbit
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:34PM
Jesus Christ, I can't believe how stupid this whole "debate" sounds whenever I read an article about it. This is pointless Ivory Tower bickering through and through. Pluto is a planet, for crying out loud. Just leave it at that and be done with it!
There are real problems in the world today. The destruction of Debian by systemd is one of them. But whether Pluto is or isn't a planet? It doesn't fucking matter!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:42PM
The point of stories about Pluto being a planet is to give nerds a chance to make Uranus jokes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @12:06AM
That's why I feel that scientists should officially change the name of Uranus to something else, like Urectum.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday October 10 2014, @11:56AM
You damn near killed 'um!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday October 10 2014, @04:55AM
Or maybe to give us a break from rants about systemd?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by azrael on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:54PM
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:45PM
If you are making up a new word, fine, define it how you want. But planet is not a new word, it's a longstanding part of the language and it has a meaning already - a meaning which includes Pluto and has included Pluto since Pluto was first discovered. You could legitimately try to fine-tune that definition, but you cannot just hijack the word and create a new definition for it which is flatly contradictory to the established meaning of the word, not legitimately at least.
The IAU lost all credibility and respect with that move, and rightly so. They can define 'planet' to mean sixpence and a partridge if they like, but that doesnt mean anyone should pay them the slightest bit of attention.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @12:52AM
It's a lot like what the systemd folks are doing. They're throwing out well established and proven knowledge, like the fact that binary log files are a bad idea, and then claiming that their long-disproven theories, like that binary log files are acceptable, have some truth and validity to them.
Then they play rotten political games to force this idiocy on their victims, including the entire Debian community.
It's really very disgusting, regardless of whether it's happening in the field of astronomy or the field of computing.
(Score: 1) by quixote on Friday October 10 2014, @03:48AM
Botanists were actually the first classifiers to deal with the problem of scientific vs common meanings, and, frankly, we've had it all worked out for centuries. (Really.)
It's simple. Scientific meanings can change because new information comes in, and that's as it should be. But common meanings just want the same word to refer to the same thing. if it looks like a daisy, don't go calling it an orchid. The problem comes in when common usage was fooled by appearances. Most people call it X, but it's really Y.
The solution is simple. When a name is in wide common usage, it gets "conserved," and only the scientists -- who actually need to know this stuff -- have to remember the real meaning.
Pluto is very entrenched in the popular usage as a planet. So conserve that name for it. Call it a "planet" because that's what everybody does. End of story. It doesn't mean you have to misclassify a whole bunch of exoplanets. It doesn't mean anything, except that astronomers need to remember its true classification according to their own system. But it can remain in the literature as a planet and nobody has to rewrite the textbooks after every astronomical congress.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday October 10 2014, @05:48AM
They could just have coined a second new term, "regular planet", as counterpart to the "dwarf planet" they coined for Pluto and similar astronomic objects, and defined "planet" as "regular or dwarf planet". Then everyone would be happy: Astronomers would find that Mercury to Neptune are regular planets while Pluto is a dwarf planet, while all others would be happy that all of them are still planets.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @11:47PM
People just need to stop being so fucking scared of change. Change is one of the few constant truths of the universe and life. Anyone who can't handle change is very ill-equipped for handling life.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tathra on Friday October 10 2014, @11:44PM
except the old meaning for "planet" was "everything orbiting the sun". this definition doesn't work because then every single asteroid, comet, and kuiper belt object would be planets. if Pluto is a planet, then Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Makemake, Eris, and others would all have to be planets too because they're all larger than Pluto. there's nothing wrong with narrowing the definition of a word to give it more meaning, especially in science where nomenclature is important. unless you can come up with a definition for "planet" that includes Pluto but excludes all of those, then including Pluto as a planet would make our solar system contain at least 15 planets. and even if you do somehow define planet to include Pluto but exclude those, you're not using the original definition of the word anyway, so instead of narrowing it down just to match with some stupid childhood rhyme, why not narrow it down enough to actually mean something?
this whole hard-on for Pluto is fucking stupid. Pluto is just an ordinary Kuiper Belt Object, one of the smaller ones at that; get over it.
(Score: 3) by Arik on Saturday October 11 2014, @08:09PM
It's the wrong time to try to draw the line at Pluto, however. Astronomers were perfectly happy to call it a planet for 70+ years and it's entered the language at this point whether they like it or not. Attempting to change that is just going to result in astronomers looking even sillier to the general pop. If you want to introduce astronomical literacy into the general population you would be better off defining Ceres and Eris and any other known bodies that orbit the sun and are massive enough to form a sphere as planets, and then introducing a more narrow definition of 'major planets' along with a consistent reasoning for what qualifies as 'major.'
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by tathra on Sunday October 12 2014, @12:21AM
so why "planets" and "major planets" (or something similar) instead of "planets" and "dwarf planets" like we have now? there is no functional difference between the 2, so why are people throwing such a huge shitfit over pluto being a "dwarf planet" instead of planet? and if its "convention" or "tradition" or something similar, then wouldn't it be even worse to suddenly start calling the 8 largest planets "major/uber/wtfever planets" instead of only changing one of them (pluto)? there is no good argument that isn't easily torn apart for keeping pluto designated as a planet; everything basically boils down to "because i said so!" or "because its what i'm used to".
seriously, this whole thing is just fucking stupid. its literally nothing more than a bunch of stubborn assholes throwing a temper tantrum because they're not getting their way, just like this systemd bullshit that people keep trolling with. you* are not the center of the universe or the world; stop acting so fucking self-centered and get over it.
* not you specifically Arik, "you" in general towards the stubborn fucktards
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 11 2014, @03:11AM
The problem is, if you're going to call Pluto a planet, then you also need to call Eris a planet, because it's bigger than Pluto and also orbits the Sun. So that means there's 10 planets, not 9.
And what about the other dwarf planets: Ceres, Huamea, and Makemake? Are they planets too? And those are just the 5 we know about; it's estimated there's another 200 such dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, and up to 10,000 if we map out all the objects outside the belt.
There's a reason we call the largest Sun-orbiters "planets", and the rest "dwarf planets", "Trans-Neptunian Objects", etc.: the planets are really big, major parts of our solar system. The other ones are just balls of rock and/or ice that also happen to orbit the Sun, but otherwise aren't nearly as interesting as a planet the size of Earth, Jupiter, or Mars. It's good to have kids memorize the 8 major planets, but they don't need to memorize the name of 100 different Sun-orbiting objects, especially when there's a bunch of moons (mostly around Saturn and Jupiter) which are much more massive and more interesting than those objects, including Titan, Io, and Europa. So why are people so hell-bent on kids memorizing Pluto, but they don't care about teaching them about Titan?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday October 10 2014, @12:30PM
Labeling is ok. Accepting political decisions is, instead, a choice.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @12:19AM
Wrong on systemd, wrong on Pluto. It doesn't fucking matter!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @01:03AM
Tork, you're always looking for an argument, aren't you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @02:19AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11 2014, @12:39AM
Tork, stop talking to yourself.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Friday October 10 2014, @02:08AM
If it's true that there's hundreds of similar kuiper belt objects (small, wonky orbit), then Pluto is distinctly different from the eight.
(Score: 2) by monster on Friday October 10 2014, @02:32PM
Exactly this.
The whole debate is almost void of technical merit and full of political chauvinism instead.
An astronomer finds a new, big object in the sky, names it Pluto and publishes the find. Everybody cheers at the advance in scientific knowledge and welcomes a new planet. Some years pass, better tools are made, and the once thought to be special object results as being just one among many big, remote objects in the outer solar system, some even bigger than Pluto. Two options are available: Refine the definition of what is needed to consider an object to be a planet (which means excluding the once thought to be one Pluto) or accept the whole lot of new "planets" into the mix. A new definition is made, which makes Pluto no longer a planet (like Ceres, but nobody discusses it. Could it be because it was discovered by an italian?), but since the country of origin of the discoverer of Pluto is a political powerhouse, it's taken as an attack on national pride and a lot of bickering ensues. Even a new type of celestial object is defined just to "demote it without demoting it", without other result than augmenting the bickering.
Pluto was a great discovery, it opened the door to a better understanding of the outer solar system. Discussing if it may be called 'planet', 'dwarf planet', 'planetoid' or 'cake' won't change a bit about its place and importance. Too much ado about nothing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 10 2014, @10:10PM
(Score: 2) by monster on Monday October 13 2014, @07:10AM
I really fail to see why, in a discipline full of names of people that are given to objects, that would be a problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 13 2014, @10:57AM
I believe the largest Solar System object explicitly named after a person is 511 Davida which is an asteroid in the main asteroid belt with a diameter of almost 300 km.
(Score: 2) by monster on Monday October 13 2014, @12:57PM
So, having an asteroid named after a person is fine, but having a planet named as a mythological being whose acronym happens to have the same initials as the discoverers' sponsor is bloody murder? I could understand it being an issue in the beginning of the twentieth century, but in 2014... it just looks like an ad-hoc explanation to justify already stablished positions.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 10 2014, @02:27AM
Far from pointless, there are money to be made from new editions of text books.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Ryuugami on Friday October 10 2014, @09:57AM
Far from pointless, there are money to be made from new editions of text books.
At least it would be an actual content change, as opposed to the usual shuffling of a few paragraphs.
If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
(Score: 1) by ItisBE on Friday October 10 2014, @02:41AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @06:45AM
How do you figure?
(Score: 1) by Darth Turbogeek on Friday October 10 2014, @08:03AM
Yeah annnnnd? Whats the problem with that? In fact that's kinda cool
(Score: 1) by ItisBE on Friday October 10 2014, @04:48PM
Nothing wrong with it, just saying that saying it's a stupid academic debate is well stupid.
Pluto and all the others being planets would be cool, but it's an important academic distinction.
(Score: 2) by LookIntoTheFuture on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:49PM
Pluto is a dark, frozen rock in the outer recesses of our solar system and does not care in the least how we classify it.
I believe that Pluto does care and I think we are being really mean to it. Won't someone please think of Pluto's feelings?
(Score: 2) by nyder on Friday October 10 2014, @04:31AM
ya, we need to think of Pluto's children!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @09:17AM
Pluto has no children, though, unless you count Saturn.
(Score: 3, Funny) by cmn32480 on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:01PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3DfwFZZXDQ [youtube.com]
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:41PM
If it got hydrostatic equilibrium and rotates around a star. It ought to be a planet?
(it could also orbit a large rock or black hole etc)
(Score: 1) by Jiro on Friday October 10 2014, @01:45AM
The definition of clearing the neighborhood excludes Neptune. Check the Wikipedia article on clearing the neighborhood; resonances are excluded.
However there are other objects in Pluto-like orbits that are not cleared, and those do disqualify Pluto.
From an exoplanet perspective, I think common sense says the definition should include orbiting another sun, not just ours. However there is still a problem--you can't see the smaller objects near exoplanets so you have no way to tell if it cleared its neighborhood anyway.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday October 10 2014, @03:35AM
Wouldn't the requirement to orbit a star exclude all rogue planets? Would Earth cease to be a planet if it is ejected from its star system?
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @12:15PM
By that logic, every time Earth gets hit by a meteorite it is disqualified from being a planet. After all, it couldn't get hit if its orbit was cleared.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @07:28AM
The sticking point for the Minor Planet Center is that the current IAU definition requires a planet to have "cleared its neighborhood", which Neptune has not (it crosses orbits with Pluto).
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @08:19AM
So maybe the ultimate result will be that Neptune will also lose planet status?
Nine little planets it on the list once made,
Pluto was too small, and then there were eight.
Eight little planets were orbiting in heaven,
Neptune's orbit was not clean, and then there were seven.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Friday October 10 2014, @11:20PM
What happens when the monolith consumes Jupiter and turns it into a star? Will the sun just have 4 planets, since Saturn will probably start orbiting the start formerly known as Jupiter?
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday October 10 2014, @12:03PM
This was my thought as well.
Poor Neptune... (ha, ha... up uranus, Neptune! Take that!)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Dale on Friday October 10 2014, @12:54PM
I've always pondered this exact thing. If Pluto gets the boot for crossing Neptune's path, then why didn't Neptune get the boot for not clearing Pluto?
At the end of the day why does it matter so much? So what if we find that we have tens or hundreds of tiny dwarf planets beyond Pluto that we are just now getting to the point that we can find them? Technology marches on and we can see our surroundings better and we get smarter (hopefully).
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday October 10 2014, @11:07AM
Sorry, but to me Pluto has always been one of the NINE planets and always will be.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday October 10 2014, @04:18PM
You do know it was discovered less than a hundred years ago, right? There isn't that much historical precedent for it being a planet. We're still trying to figure this crazy universe out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedBear on Friday October 10 2014, @11:12AM
I have been wanting to vent a bit about this for a few years now, so bear with me, if you will. This is a bit long-winded, even for me.
To me, this silly debate over Pluto's status is prime evidence that even highly educated, intelligent people with multiple college degrees (like the most public and vocal proponent of this issue, Neil deGrasse Tyson) can still be ignorant, stuck-up morons. It's also good evidence that even highly educated, scientifically minded people easily confuse intrinsic (inherent, unchanging) properties with extrinsic (external, changing) properties. Allow me to elaborate with several examples why I think this is one of the silliest arguments the scientific community has been wasting time on in modern times.
Firstly, this "clearing its neighborhood" thing is obviously an extrinsic property. No matter its orbit or size/shape/composition, a planet will not clear its orbit for millions of years. Yet during that time the object will not change in any significant way, nor will its orbit. If we would call it a planet after its orbit is cleared, then the same object should obviously be called a planet prior to clearing its orbit, since its intrinsic properties will not have changed.
The requirement for an atmosphere is also bogus, since even a planet much larger than the Earth could have its atmosphere stripped away if it happens to be too close to its star, or fails to have a strong enough protective magnetic field, or gets hit by a coronal mass ejection, etc. Again, if the object's intrinsic properties (size, shape, composition) would qualify it to be called a planet if it did have an atmosphere, what is the justification in refusing to call it a planet if the atmosphere happens to get stripped away or frozen solid? It makes no sense. A planet larger than the Earth but with no atmosphere is what, an asteroid? Really?
Going even further, the requirement that a planet orbits the Sun directly is equally silly. Once again this is a transitory, changeable, extrinsic property. Let's say a small black hole or a large rogue planet whipped through our solar system, caught the Earth in its sphere of gravitic influence and caused the Earth to wind up orbiting Jupiter. According to the current definition of "planet", the Earth would no longer be a planet. We'd have to call it a moon. Yet would its intrinsic nature have changed in any way? Nope. Only its orbital reference point changed. An extrinsic property. If an object doesn't change, why should we have to refer to it using different nomenclature?
To make the silliness of all this even more clear, let's use a more familiar object. How about a bicycle. A small, red children's bicycle with a banana seat, training wheels and silver tassels hanging off the handgrips.
- If this object was sitting in your living room wrapped in paper on Christmas morning, you would call it a: Bicycle.
- If this object was being ridden in the middle of a neighborhood street, you would call it a: Bicycle.
- If this object was at the bottom of the ocean, you would call it a: Bicycle.
- If this object was taken up on a rocket and released into orbit around the Earth, you would call it a: Bicycle.
- If this object was sent into its own orbit around the Sun, you would call it a: Bicycle.
- If this object was sent out into the Kuiper belt, you would call it a: Bicycle. (*sigh*, Yes, Neil deGrasse Tyson, at that point you can _also_ call it a Kuiper Belt Object, but that does _not_ preclude it from continuing to be a bicycle! To throw your paraphrased quote back at you, sir, "It's still a bicycle. Get over it!")
And if you remove the tassels and training wheels, paint it blue instead of red, add a little bell that goes "Ding-ding!" and put on tires made of solid gold instead of rubber, it's still a: Bicycle.
Anyway, point is, moving an object around in spacetime and changing minor properties does nothing to change its intrinsic nature. Whether the object we're referring to is a bicycle or a planet should make no difference. If you melt the bicycle down into an ingot of miscellaneous metallic elements, that's when it stops being a bicycle.
The objective truth is that we should actually have something like 36 "planets" in our solar system family, if we were using any sort of rational scientific definition of what a planet is. It's just that some would be called major planets or maybe solar planets (if they orbit the Sun), while others would be called minor planets (if they're too far out or not part of the main elliptic plane) or satellite planets (if they orbit other planets). But they would all be planets. I'm not going to be particularly impressed by the scientific community until they agree to use a simple, logical definition of planet that should probably include everything larger than a non-spherical planetoid or proto-planet and smaller than a brown dwarf star. As far as I can tell there is no scientific reason to have different names for what are simply different sizes of the same kind of object. Different classes, sure.
Even our own moon is big enough to be spherical, so by all rights we should simply call it a satellite planet just like all the other spherical moons. After all, if Io or Ganymede or Titan or Europa were orbiting the Sun on their own, we would call them all planets, and they would be exactly the same as they are right now, just in a different location in spacetime, with a different relative motion.
Any five-year-old would probably understand the simple, logical argument I've put forth here. The astronomers need to find more scientifically important things to argue about. The universe contains singularities (maybe), stars (heavy-element factories with ongoing internal nuclear reactions), planets (things that are spherical but not big enough to sustain nuclear reactions), and sub-planet-sized objects from planetoid size down to microscopic dust particles. It really doesn't have to be so damn complicated. Leave the extrinsic properties out, and it becomes remarkably simple.
The best, most hilarious part of this whole thing is that they say Pluto isn't a planet, but now it's a "dwarf planet". So it's a... small... planet...? Wait, what exactly are we all arguing about again? Why is NdT running around vehemently insisting that Pluto's not a planet, when we're clearly still referring to it as a planet, with only a minor modifier in front? What the hell is the point of telling every schoolchild that they're not allowed to call Pluto a planet anymore? What did any of this accomplish scientifically? Idiocy runs rampant.
/rant mode off
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Friday October 10 2014, @01:05PM
Well, I'd say let's put in charge of the committee that makes all these rules, but as you make too much sense, I'm sure that would never fly.
I'm completely down with your arguments, though..
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by monster on Friday October 10 2014, @03:02PM
The problem is that part of the definition lies in extrinsic properties. For example, Ganymede [wikipedia.org] at 5,268 km of diameter is bigger than Mercury [wikipedia.org] (4,880 km), but since it orbits Jupiter and not the sun it's not considered a planet.
So, from your rant, if the Earth was indeed ejected to orbit Jupiter then yes, Earth would stop being a planet and just be a moon. That is the price of having a commonly understood definition.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Friday October 10 2014, @06:28PM
Congrats on utterly missing my entire point as well as the point of the article summary. Impressive.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by monster on Monday October 13 2014, @07:05AM
I didn't miss your point. What you seem to miss is that the difference between a thing called "planet" and a thing called something else is not due to intrinsic properties, and can't be, because there isn't any set of intrinsic properties that gives you the current lot of planets (with or without Pluto, I don't care) and excludes many other objects without some even more arbitrary criteria (size? mass? composition?). What you proposal would get may be a "mathematically correct" definition, but it would be much more complex than the current, imperfect one. And given that what the summary shows is much nitpicking about words instead of the use of common sense, they go in the same direction of arguing about form instead of about substance.
So, your example of a "bycicle" in space is clear and serves your argument well. That's nice, too bad that it stands on the same shaky, inapplicable ground of spherical cows. What if you find two wheels joint by half a frame, is it still a bycicle? What if you find all the pieces tied together with a chain instead of mounted? What if there are two monocycles tied together? What if you find a rock with the form of a bycicle, but it's not functional? In the end, your "bycicle in space" argument just rests on some intrinsic, shared definition of what a bycicle is, but conveniently avoids the corner cases that would need a more specific definition, and that is exactly the problem with the evolution of the definition of "planet" that got us to this state of things.
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Saturday October 11 2014, @07:49AM
Um, we can have definitions for things based on extrinsic properties. If that bicycle was given from one person to another without expectation of anything in return, we call it a "gift". If money was exchanged instead, it is called a "purchase". If it is taken without consent, we call it "stolen property". By the same token, I understand the definition of a planet to be a major body that orbits a star. Sure, that status could change, and hence so would its name. We can also give it definitions not based on circumstances or relationships, based on intrinsic properties instead, like "bicycle." But that bicycle can still be a gift, or a purchase, just like that major body out there can be a planet, or a satellite (orbits a planet). I know this doesn't help the original problem of what to call pluto, but I just wanted to make sure we know that we can have definitions based on extrinsic properties.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday October 10 2014, @12:28PM
Here's the basic argument: If Pluto is a planet, then why is the larger and rounder object Eris not a planet? What about Ceres, which is also more significant than Pluto? The fact that there are other objects along roughly the same orbit seems significant to the object's history: among other things, it means that it's probably not done colliding with other fairly large objects yet the way Earth probably is.
My guess is that it has to do with the fact that a lot of us learned Mercury-Venus-Earth-Mars-(asteroids)-Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune-Pluto as small children, and have a hard time changing our minds.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @01:06PM
Why doesn't anybody ever seem to remember that Pluto isn't the only Dwarf planet?
Seriously this whole debate started because We found out that a lot of Kuiper belt objects qualify as planets.
So now if we accept Pluto as a full planet we would have to accept up to 46 others as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_dwarf_planets [wikipedia.org]
Personally I don't care either way; that one thing just bugs me.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 10 2014, @10:17PM