Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
Or not.
Last week, Pluto was voted off the interplanetary island. It was downgraded to a mere dwarf celestial body, and one with a bum orbit at that.
People, people, is nothing sacred?
For the International Astronomical Union, the answer clearly is “no.” The IAU unceremoniously stripped Pluto of planetary status at a meeting in Prague, and some of us are not taking this well.
“My computer’s been smoking with e-mail about this,” said Richard McCray, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and professor emeritus of astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The debate is roiling and he hasn’t even begun to hear from the millions of disgruntled fourth-graders out there.
“New scientific data always change things,” said Kirk Johnson, vice president for research and collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, “and people hate that. The scientific knowledge they have was hard-won, so it’s understandable that change makes them distrust things.”
The next thing you know they’ll tell us scientists can harvest stem cells without destroying embryos.
Oh, wait, that happened last week, too.
“A lot of people think that science is just a collection of facts,” Johnson said, “but the way I look at it, it’s carving away at the edge of what we don’t know.”
That’s why what we do know is constantly being revised, reinterpreted or in the case of Pluto, reclassified.
“To me, it’s kind of beautiful,” said McCray, who admits he chafes against the notion of scientists as “high priests.”
“I hate that. Scientists don’t give edicts. They’re in the business of trying to discover. Everything they do is tentative, particularly if they’re working at the frontiers – and that’s the fun place to work.
“It’s not as if we bring tablets down from the mountaintop.”
The reclassification of Pluto is an example of how researchers challenge each other and correct mistakes, Johnson said. “Science is one of the most honest of human endeavors.”
Sure, some researchers have faked data or lied about experiments, but the nature of the process is to test theories to see if the data can be duplicated, so fraud tends to be discovered quickly, he said.
Science also is obstinate, independent and nonpartisan – annoyingly so.
“Politicians don’t like science,” McCray said. “It’s because science is uncontrollable. You can’t make laws against it because the truth is going to come out no matter what, and the guys in Washington are all control freaks.”
Science is ruled by data, by facts – not by ideology. So despite sentimental attachments to certain concepts, scientists periodically have to accept the possibility that they’re just plain wrong about some things – like Pluto.
When satellite images and a new class of powerful telescopes opened vast regions of the universe to human exploration, the Pluto dilemma reared its ugly asteroid and threw decades of traditional science instruction into the trash heap.
“We’ve now found that Pluto’s moon is almost as big as Pluto, and we’ve found another minor planet out there that’s bigger than Pluto,” said McCray. “So if we keep Pluto, we’d have to add a few more planets, and then it would be open-ended.”
Then there’s the debate about how to define a planet since some are rocks, some ice, some just orbiting balls of gas – and whether any of it means anything anyway in the grand scheme of things.
“Really, whether you call Pluto a planet or not is scientifically inconsequential,” McCray said. “Personally, I would have preferred that the International Astronomical Union remain silent and let schoolkids decide whether Pluto is a planet.”
The teacher in him can’t resist tossing out a delicious challenge.
I love that idea.
Imagine how much more kids would learn from that discussion than from just memorizing “My very excellent mother just sent us nine pizzas.”
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
