The solar system
Russell wrote a terrific, exhilarating post about the solar system and Pluto and changing knowledge today. (It looks as if he wrote it tomorrow, but that’s because Metamagician is on Oz time even when Russell isn’t.)
Until very recently, astronomy needed no formal definition of a planet, but this has changed as our knowledge of the Solar System has increased. During the 1990s we discovered a toroidal region of space known as the Kuiper Belt, which contains not only Pluto but many other objects of similar composition and with similarly unusual orbits when compared to those of the eight larger planets. With a better understanding of the Solar System, astronomers came to understand Pluto as the largest of these Kuiper Belt objects, all of which are very different from any of the other eight planets, and much smaller. Astronomers began to find large objects even beyond the Kuiper Belt, all contributing to what I call the Grand Opening Up of the Solar System.
See…that’s interesting. In our own lifetimes, just in the past couple of decades, astronomers have expanded what they (and thanks to them, we, if we learn) know about the Solar System. It’s interesting that they discover new things, and the news things they discover are interesting.
There is an exciting story to be told about the Grand Opening Up of the Solar System, how it led to efforts in 2006 to develop a definitions of such categories as “planet”, and how it still goes on. A well-informed science journalist with good publishing connections could get a wonderful book out of this story, in the process telling the public much about contemporary astronomy and why the study of our own Solar System is currently in such a wonderful ferment. I’d like to read that book…Unfortunately, I can’t imagine Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum writing that book. Where I see excited astronomers responding rationally and reasonably to the Grand Opening Up of the Solar System – refining the categories and definitions that they use in their work – they see a bunch of mean scientists taking an opportunity to give the public a poke in the eye by taking away its beloved ninth planet. This is a pity. They could have done some positive communication here, in the opening chapter of Unscientific America. Instead, they produced a dull and inaccurate narrative that is meant to support their theory that out-of-touch (or even mean-natured and anti-populist) scientists are largely to blame for America’s alarming degree of scientific illiteracy. What a waste of a great opportunity to practice what they preach, and improve the public’s understanding of what is really going on in science.
Exactly. Isn’t it sad. That brief post of Russell’s is exactly the kind of thing that M&K want, if they only knew it.
I haven’t read Mooney’s classic work.
Do they really complain that Pluto is no longer a planet? Why would Pluto no longer being a planet matter to anyone?
The way things have gone these past few months, in 50 years time when I am a rheumy old man and Ophelia is a head floating in a jar of fluid (with robot arms! and lasers!!), we’ll still look back at the Summer of Ought-Nine as the Summer of Moonenbaum.
Amos, you can read the first chapter online I believe at amazon (that’s the sum total of The Pluto Argument, they abandon it in later chapters). For the sake of comprehensivity:
1. The first paragraph of the book notes that Pluto’s “mythological”, “historical”, and “cultural” status was ripped as the scientists changed its scientific status.
1.1. Nothing more is said about its mythological or historical status.
1.2. For cultural arguments, there are citations of bumper stickers that read things like “Viva Pluto!” and “Stop Planetary Discrimination!”, which are notsomuch arguments as expressions of Hooray and Boo-urns.
2. Emphasis is put upon the fact that the status change was “arguably” a semantic exercise and not a scientific one. This is a weak claim; if arguably it is, then arguably it isn’t.
2.1. Their citation on the “arguably” claim is to a dated post by one of their fellow Discover bloggers whose entire post is predicated upon the anticipation of an IAU decision to include Pluto as a planet;
2.2. Where he argues for the scientific/semantic dichotomy for the following reasons: a) however you define it, a strict definition will admit of unintuitive counter-examples; b) the act of definition is cultural, and therefore not strict; c) it’s divisive, confusing, may lead us to be narrow-minded and miss important things; d) the criteria for making the definition are arbitrary anyway.
2.2.a. Nobody ever thought to ask what professional semantics researchers have to say. W.V.O. Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism abandoned the analytic/synthetic distinction and put the science/semantics distinction on wobbly legs. The ensuing discoveries of cognitive semantics (sp. Eleanor Rosch; George Lakoff’s “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things” is an excellent and enjoyable primer) has led to a sea-change in our understanding of meaning. One result is that nowadays it is not uncommon to hear that all categories will admit of unintuitive counterexamples. Even the definition of “bachelor” as “unmarried adult male” sounds daft when we ask whether or not the Pope or Tarzan are bachelors. Evidently they are, by that definition, but there’s still something pretty dumb about saying “The Pope is a bachelor”, and adding a qualifier like “eligible” would make nonsense of such phrases as “uneligible bachelor”.
2.2.b. Any common behavior is cultural by definition, making most scientific definitions cultural; that doesn’t mean anything about their objective value.
2.2.c. These claims are left entirely unsubstantiated, so they only function as pejoratives.
2.2.d. When it comes to the point where he needs to provide justification for the claim that the criteria are arbitrary, he admits that the criteria are actually not arbitrary, they’re just unsatisfying. But then, see (a).
3. The change in definition was divisive. People were aghast! Evidence for the claim that people were choking on their yogurt over this falls into three categories: “nutty”, “dumb jokes”, and “irrelevant”.
3.1. Nutty. Some protest web sites appeared. Also, New Mexicans declared a “Pluto Planet Day” because a New Mexican discovered Pluto in the first place.
3.2. Dumb jokes. a) A Facebook group called “When I was your age, Pluto was a Planet” had oodles of members; b) “Plutoed” entered the American dialect, meaning “demoted or devalued”; c) Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert made topical quips about politics that used the Pluto event as a metaphor, and were misunderstood by Mooney and Kirshenbaum as being snipes at the name change itself. d) Some “wags” called the IAU the “Irrelevant Astronomic Union”.
3.3. Irrelevant. Dr. Alan Stern objected that not enough scientists were represented at the IAU meeting. That’s a considerable charge, but since it has nothing to do with the purported “cultural” status of Pluto, it is irrelevant.
But later on (in their reply to Myers) they distanced themselves from the claim that they were upset about the demotion of the planet, making the entire first chapter more or less a waste of time, including this post about it.
What effect has the discovery and subsequent loss of Pluto had on astrology? Surely this, if nothing else, must be of vital concern to M&K.
Surely the controversy about Pluto has increased the general level of knowledge about Pluto and the Kuiper Belt?
If your concern is that people have scientific knowledge this is a good thing I would have thought. If your concern is that scientists are revered by the public, then not so much.
Bravo, Ben!
That must have taken all six arms. Heehee.
Ben: Thank you very much for your complete explanation.
Actually, the whole Pluto issue confuses me, because I suspect that those who use humorous bumper-stickers about keeping Pluto as a planet are not the scientifically illiterate, that is, those who believe that a God with a white beard created the world in 6 days, but people like myself whose knowledge of science is not illiterate, but about on the level of the science section of the BBC. People who are scientifically illiterate have no idea of which planets make up the solar system or even what the solar system is. So the pro-Pluto people have nothing to do with the issue that Mooney is supposedly talking about.
Ben: I have the impression that you’ve just said the final and definitive word or rather paragraph about the collected works of Mooney and Co. The Munichney crisis, whatever Mooney’s intellectual merits or lack of them, has kept many a mind from backsliding into the solitary and sad vice of TV viewing during the past months. Thank you, Chris Munichney for months of online debate.