I do know the source of these remarks: they stem from the eternal
conflict between two philosophes in my mind. These are the hippy-dippy
Carl Sagan atheist who says "You don't need God to have a good time,
man; look at all the wonder in the natural universe!", and the cranky
Richard Dawkins atheist who says "The wonder is all in your brain, you
pothead! Not distributed throughout the universe!"
The Carl Sagan philosophe was formed in a transcendental
experience I had when I was six years old. You know those charts that
go on the walls in elementary school classrooms? Instead of putting a
few of them on the walls, my kindergarten teacher, Jim Murchison,
bought an enormous number of them. He punched holes in them and turned
them into a huge flip chart. Every day or two he would flip over a
sheet and reveal the new topic of discussion. One day he flipped over
a sheet and I saw the solar system.
What's more, the universe does not contain a magical kind of thing
called a "planet". Planetness is a social construct. The solar system
is not the sun and nine planets, as depicted on the flip chart of my
youth. It's a fusing gasball, four non-fusing gasballs, a few million
rockballs, a few billion snowballs, and a big dust cloud.
Recently, the International Astronomical Union decided to make a
proper scientific definition out of the social construct
"planet". This used to seem easy and even superfluous, but in recent years it's become clear that to judge every
object in the solar system by a uniform standard of planetness, you
must make a hard decision. Either Pluto is not a planet, or there are
lots of Kuiper Belt objects which are planets on the same
criteria as Pluto. These planets are very distant, mostly
undiscovered, and not very interesting once discovered. There might be
hundreds of these tiny boring planets. So the IAU created a definition
that excludes these objects, including Pluto.
It's not nice to fool Mother Nature, but it's even less nice
to naturalize Mother Social Construct. People are used to the planets
being the non-fusing gasballs, four of the biggest rockballs, and Pluto. A lot of people got mad at what they viewed as a bunch
of eggheads usurping their social construct. And now the eggheads are
arguing
amongst themselves about the definition. It's a huge mess.
The real problem with this definition is that, to get the "right" result, the IAU restricted
the definition to apply only to our solar system. It's the
Bush v. Gore of scientific definitions! They had to do this because extrasolar systems perform instant
reductio on any attempt to turn "planet" into an objective
concept. There are too many weird things in the universe. It would
have been simpler if they'd just enumerated by fiat the eight things
in our solar system that are "real" planets.
Astronomers have found things like two non-fusing
gasballs orbiting each other in interstellar space. Are they
planets? Only if we decide to call them "planets". What they
are is big non-fusing gasballs that orbit each other. A gasball
can have natural starness, but it cannot have natural planetness, any
more than (as Michael Shermer says) it
can have natural meaningness. This is what social constructs are
for.
I personally don't care if Pluto is called a planet or not. My
money is still on "alien disco ball". But
if we must have a definition of planetness, it should recognize
the inevitable subjectivity. If you don't do this, you need an
artificial ban on discussing what might make an extrasolar object a
"planet". Because sooner or later the smart-aleck universe will toss
you a planet that doesn't meets the technical criteria, or (less
likely) a non-planet that does. Then you have to tweak the definition
and it's like adding epicycles to the Ptolemaic model of the solar
system.
(3) Sat Aug 26 2006 14:28 Transcendental Transneptunianism:
Occasionally Sumana has transcendental experiences associated with
revelations about the universe. Incredibly, I always manage to ruin
these experiences by making some bonehead remark. I can't remember any
of these remarks verbatim, but I have no trouble thinking them up and
saying them when the need arises. I'd like to not do that next
time because it really brings the transcendental party to a halt with
a loud record-scratch sound.
I'd surely been to
the Griffith Observatory before then, but somehow I hadn't seen any
pictures of the planets before this reveal. Jupiter, in particular,
blew me away. Seeing drawings of the planets triggered my first and biggest transcendental
experience. Since I always ruin Sumana's transcendental experiences
it's only fair that I should ruin my own. Jupiter isn't
transcendental; it just looks really creepy. It's a planet, a gasball.