Speak
Piffle and Poppycock
September 16, 2006 2:22 am
The jury has been out for a long time concerning Pluto. Ever since its discovery It's been a source of debate. Is it an ice ball? Is it really a planet? Is it a large protoplanet, instead?
I think the Bill Bryson said it best in "A Short History of Nearly Everything": We're a lonely planet with many many light years of nearly empty space separating us from the closest star system. We need as many heavenly neighbors as we can. Pluto's still MY planet!
— Double-Oh Average Joe
Talk amongst yourselves and with the author.
Discussion from previous months can be accessed by following the links below.
September 2006
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Re: Piffle and Poppycock
September 16, 2006 10:40 pm
Yeah, I'm trying to be stoic about the whole thing, but the loss of Pluto as a full-fledged planet screws all sorts of things up. Numerology, for example. Nine is three times three, a pregnancy lasts nine months; there's any number of mystical things going on with the nimber nine (and the number 27, three times nine, which not only relates to pi, but also has a strange conection to the relative sizes of the sun the moon and the earth; okay shh).
That said, I'm not a mystical sort of guy, but we on this planet have a long and shared history of ordering our lives by the heavens, and, for us, a nine planet solar system will always exist, at least until the 27th planet is discovered.— Kit Roebuck
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Re: Piffle and Poppycock
September 18, 2006 4:06 pm
Aboslutely right, both of you. I say that as a community we should stand up against science. I love science ten days a week, and all that, but part of the scientific process is an obligation to make scientific statements based on cold, hard calculations and not "how I feel today about the universe." Science has been reversed many times in the past by moments of great intuition or genius, but in this case I just feel like astronomists are just crying for attention. Every schoolchild knows that Pluto is our tiny, friendly neighbor. Changing our definition of "planet" to exclude Pluto seems like playground politics to keep us from getting the nerdy kid on our kickball team.
We should stand up for science as a concept, rather than science as an exercise on CNN. Tell your friendly local science-y type people that you want them to explore space in a more productive, less angsty sort of fasion.— Bunsen