New Mexico Might Declare Pluto a Planet 328
pease1 writes "Wired and others are reporting that for New Mexico, the fight for Pluto is not over. Seven months after the International Astronomical Union downgraded the distant heavenly body to a 'dwarf planet,' a state representative in New Mexico aims to give the snubbed world back some of its respect. State lawmakers will vote Tuesday on a bill that proposes that 'as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet.' The lawmaker who introduced the measure represents the county in which Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto's discoverer, was born. For many of us old timers, and those who had the honor of meeting Clyde, this just causes a belly laugh and is pure fun. Not to mention a bit of poking a stick in the eye."
Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop listening to scientists! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fine (Score:3, Insightful)
I never stopped considering Pluto a planet; the new definition is no more attractive than the previous hand-waving, and frankly, I like my definition better anyway:
Think about the known solar system in those terms. Does that not put everything in its place in a reasonable fashion, without disturbing our previous understandings?
Re:Is that even possible? (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Oklahoma's legislature to say that eclipses really are dragons eating the moon.
North Carolina is considering a bill to re-instate earth, water, air, and fire as elements.
The reason for this is obvious: (Score:2, Insightful)
Being enlightened slashdotters, most of us have little appreciation for how stupid people really are. I am here to say that yes, they are that stupid.
Re:Fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, schoolbooks? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is that even possible? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Is that even possible? (Score:3, Insightful)
The first ammendment states that noone can interfere with anyone calling Pluto anything they want, including a cartoon dog. If the state legislature decided that calling Pluto a Dwarf Planet violated the state constitution, that in turn would violate the US Constitution because as a New Mexico and a US Citizen, I would simultaneously be restricted from saying, "Pluto is a Dwarf Planet" (under NM law) and allowed to say it (under US law).
They are setting a precedent of slipperiness here. By defining Pluto in terms of what citizens are allowed to call it, they actually introduce the notion/thought/possible (mis)understanding of their state contitution that says citizens are only allowed to define objects in a way that the state legislature permits. The law is unnecessary in the same way that any anti-discrimination law (should be) unecessary -- non-discrimination is already protected as an interpretation of the consitution. The law, by leaving some groups out (e.g. hemaphroditic pagans), can actually weaken the original intent of the consitution, because the law introduces the idea that the consitution should not be interpretated to include those groups. Laws like this can provide a de facto interpretation of the intent of the constitution.
As a bizarre example, if I were to draft a contract in New Mexico now that had the words "Pluto, a dwarf planet," in it, and actually got someone to sign it, I could probably claim the contract void after the state legislator does their magic. So while a funny addition to the New Mexico lawbooks, the legislators should actually be extremely careful in how they write the law. In all honesty, they made the news and should probably just drop the law at this point, before they do something stupid (or waste hundreds of hours researching similar laws and avoiding the pitfalls that they made).
Or so a lawyer would argue, of which I am not one. Fortunately, hypothetical arguments are still protected in both the US and the sovereign state of California, so I'm okay...
One simple reason for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Clyde Tombaugh.
He found Pluto at a time when detecting planets was done with glass plate negatives and telescopes that were manually driven. He knew he was looking for a planet but where to find it was a matter of subjective debate. But he was the consummate scientist; as his wife noted after the demotion of Pluto, he would have been disappointed but he would have understood.
Re:Stop listening to scientists! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That... that's super. (Score:1, Insightful)
This is just a matter of semantics, nothing else. A bunch of scientists had a vote and decided to change Pluto's classification. This is no different. I think the time the scientists spent on reclassifying Pluto was an equally large waste of time.
Re:Fine (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The saddest thing (Score:2, Insightful)
2. Some people from the New Mexico county in which Clyde Tombaugh (the tireless discover of said celestial body) was born wanted to honor him, in defiance of the slithy toves and slimy weasels that would deprive him of his hard-earned recognition. I'm not going to provide a link you probably won't follow anyway, but you might find that he deduced the presence of an unseen planet from perturbations of Neptune's orbit and found the tiny pinprick of light only after weeks of staring into "blink-comparators" which alternate views of the same patch of sky taken over an interval.
3. Not all scientists are nasty. Some are blinkered by their own exactitude, but many will continue to consider Pluto a planet. Factoid: Part of the reason Pluto was named such was to honor Percival Lowell, (that's the PL part, duh) and if you've never heard of him, you might be beyond remedial reading.
4. You seem to imply that no other research is going on because the question of Pluto's status is taking up all the space for other news. If you look around, there's more than plenty.
5. Stop being sad and judgemental. If you're young and healthy, learn and enjoy as much as you can. Plenty of time for dread and sorrow later...
Re:Fine (Score:2, Insightful)
But "spheroidness" is also a continuum, and composition and history may affect it more than mass does. If we use spheroidness as the guide, then one still needs to pick an arbitrary boundary. Thus, it is not a signif improvement over mass or diameter. Plus, gas giants have no clear surface boundary. One would have to make an exception for them.
Bad Priorities (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The saddest thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In other news. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think tongue-in-cheek list I made is completely dissimilar to this situation, in that I'm trying to highlight the asininity of legislation like this. If the law were based on trying to construct a reasonable definition of a planet they would almost certainly have to include similar objects. Like Eris, which also has a trans-Neptunian orbit but is actually larger than Pluto and in that sense is a stronger candidate for planethood.
Possibly it would have been better to come up with something along the lines of "California re-instates neptunium as a chemical element." Neptunium was originally thought to be an element, but was removed from the list as our understanding of chemistry improved and the definition of a chemical element was refined. But I left that out because it lacks the slapstick qualities of the three I did use.
Re:Is that even possible? (Score:2, Insightful)
This bill is a complete waste of time and taxpayer money. It is not the place of government (nor religion) to declare something a fact when it contradicts information obtained using the scientific process.
WTF?! You realize we're talking about whether to call Pluto a planet or not, right? This is a social convention, not a fact of nature. It's a societal decision about how we use words, it has nothing to do with any even remotely scientific process, nor can it possibly contradict information. If you think you should name your baby Dwight and your wife thinks he should be named Fred, you're not arguing about a fact of the world, nor is there a true and right answer, nor can either of you be correct or incorrect in any meaningful sense of the word.
It's highly amusing that there are some people who think there's some fact of the matter about what is or isn't a planet that's independent of what we arbitrarily choose to call a planet. The law in question is silly, granted, but it does not in any way at all whatsoever "contradict information obtained using the scientific process".
Re:So we have 15+ planets now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So we have 15+ planets now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So we have 15+ planets now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Making schoolchildren memorize arbitrary nomenclature is often useless and one of the many signs that our school systems are structured and run by the clueless.
As to why you'd have them memorize the names of any planets at all, you'd probably mention to them (not make them memorize) the first few discovered by our relatively limited earthbound observations as an unimportant but mildly interesting historical issue, and any beyond that which might be educational in and of themselves. I suspect you'd want to tell them how large the current planet count has become, again purely as a matter of interest, and as an intellectual fulcrum for you to inform them that said number is expected to change shortly, and often. Along with the asteroid count, the comet count, the satellite count, the star count, the galaxy count, etc.
There is no need for them to "memorize" any of these names and numbers until or unless they decide to focus on space science one way or another. And perhaps not even then. They just need to know that there are other planets out there in our system, and how planetary systems work, so they don't get caught up in superstitious nonsense.
On top of this, they need to know how to look things up so that when they want a fact for some reason, they can go get it with minimal fanfare.
Intellectual honesty, critical thinking skills, and the ability to use reference materials fluidly are all far more educationally valuable than canned, arbitrary information that came from a committee not entirely in internal agreement anyway.
Re:Fine (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't science. This is simply nomenclature that arises from entirely arbitrary attempts at classing. As for the rest, I decline to respond, as you have convinced me that you are being intentionally abrasive.
Re:arrrrr? (Score:4, Insightful)
You should learn about the subjunctive.
Thanks.