I Feel Pluto’s Pain
Posted by limpetfan | Posted in Embarrassing Moments, Science | Posted on 12-02-2009-05-2008
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Remember how I recently said it is very hard to embarrass me? I think I said something about having a thick skin, the result of being dubbed a geek for most of my life. Well, last night my boyfriend proved that it is most definitely possible to embarrass me – and oh boy did he do it in style!
For the last month and a half, I have been looking forward to attending a lecture called “Witness to Demotion: The Rise and Fall of Planet Pluto,” to be given by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think Dr. Tyson is unbelievably cool – he takes unbelievably complicated astrophysical subjects and makes regular people understand them, and he gets you to laugh while he’s doing it. For one of my Christmas gifts, my mom pre-ordered his new book (The Pluto Files) for me because she knew how badly I wanted to read it. For the record, I think Pluto is awesome, regardless of its planetary status. The lecture, highlighting the book, was announced shortly after Christmas, and I jumped all over it – bought tickets to attend as soon as I could, and I told Nicole about it, too (a fellow Plutophile and Dr. Tyson fan). We have been plotting with each other about how awesome the lecture would be for weeks, and we sat and read the book together as soon as it was released.
A bit of background: Alex does not always see eye to eye with me and Nicole when it comes to the subject of Pluto.
So yesterday arrived. Nicole and I were prepared. Each of us had our books in hand when we arrived at the American Museum of Natural History for the lecture. The lecture was great. At the end Dr. Tyson announced he’d be signing books in the lobby for anyone that was interested. Everyonewas interested, which is a testament to how engaging this guy really is. And so we waited in the line of extreme longness to get our copies of The Pluto Files signed.
It was hot. It was crowded. Alex was a good sport and waited with us. As we got closer to the front of the line, I started to chicken out. This was one of my science idols. I wasn’t sure I could handle interacting with him. So I turned to Alex, handed him my book, and said he might need to hand Dr. Tyson the book for me. He found this bizarre, but took the book. Little did I know, the wheels in his head were whirling around at a dangerous pace.
And so it was that after about a 40 minute wait I arrived at the front of the line with my dear boyfriend and my book to have Dr. Tyson sign the front page. The following is an approximation of the way that interaction went:
Alex: hands book to Dr. Tyson, “That’s for Christina.”
Dr. Tyson: “And where is Christina?”
Me: “That’s me.”
Alex: “Yeah, you’ve got a disbeliever here.”
Dr. Tyson: “A disbeliever?” Looks at me with amusement. “What do you mean?”
Alex: “She’s not sure she believes this whole Pluto thing.”
Me: Speechless with embarrassment, can only open and close my mouth silently. I can feel my body start to overheat.
Dr. Tyson: Looks at me as if I have 14 heads sprouting from my left elbow. “I see… well let me check the page… Ok… and how do you spell Christina?”
Me: Barely able to spell my own name, wanting to crawl away and hide from the shame of Dr. Tyson thinking I am questioning his entire book. I am now sweating profusely, and a little bit wishing I had not asked Alex to hand Dr. Tyson my book.
Alex: “C-h-r-i-s-t-i-n-a”
Dr. Tyson: Signs the book, hands it back, smiling the whole time.
That’s it. Well, it’s not it. Because here is what he wrote:
“To Christina, We can surely agree on page 159. Neil deGrasse Tyson”
Want to know what’s on page 159? A comic from a newspaper in Montreal that contains a drawing of Pluto. The headline reads: “News Item: Now Pluto Is NOT a Planet” and Pluto itself is saying “Like I’m supposed to give a s**t?”
Mortified! Horrified! I’m not sure I can ever go to AMNH again for fear of Dr. Tyson seeing me and remembering I am the girl who thinks he’s full of crap! Alex will probably tell you he was trying to ensure Dr. Tyson interacted with me, and the best way he could think of to have that happen was to create conflict. He and I argue about Pluto’s status all the time – he is not as sentimental towards the now-dwarf as I am. I don’t think he anticipated my level of star-struck muteness when faced with the prospect of actually speaking to Dr. Tyson.
But at least my book got signed…
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I cannot believe you didn’t open your mouth to say that it wasn’t true, lmao.
PRICELESS!!!! You got probably the coolest inscription in your book than anyone else in the entire book signing. Treasure it. And I should hope that you run into him, and that you go back, because chances are he will remember you, but this time you can pull yourself up and explain that Alex was just trying to get your goat. Then you’ll have a real conversation with him!
I got to go to a Jane Goodall book signing once. I don’t recall anything particularly embarrassing happening. But I suppose that looking at Jane Goodall just sitting a few feet away from me at the book signing table was quite a bit like your astrophysicist dude.
Me = anthro geek
You = space geek
Us = geeks in general
Thing to remember that even though your Astrophysicist God is a God to you, he’s still a space geek.
HA HA, Alex just totally got you. That is great.
I believe a bit more background is needed here:
On the way to the ANHM, Christina’s passion for Dr. Tyson became rather palpable when she professed (in a high-pitched dolce voice): “I love him”. I proceeded to be a-pain-in-the-ass by stating that I was going to heckle and hiss at Dr Tyson when he tries to explain his reasoning for believing that Pluto is not a legitimate planet.
In reality, I am very much on board with this mode of thinking, but Dr Tyson is much more of a master lecturer than I. He was aptly able to sell the demotion of Pluto as a positive when he suggested that it was in fact the first Kuiper belt to be found; I usually just pass Pluto off as nothing more that cosmic dust.
I should also point out that I could understand Christina’s apprehensions about speaking with Dr Tyson: he is a dominant dynamic figure who has enormous personality; but his also very personable and quite jovial, which, in my mind, should dissolve any fear that may arise when meeting such a great public figure.
Also, while it is true that Christina was very embarrassed by the incident-her face turn the same color as the dark red sweater she was wearing, she will thank me in the future for making her first encounter with Dr. Tyson a memorable one; one that may be used to broach a conversation in the future as Whitney rightfully suggested
As a whole, the evening was quite enlightening for me: I learned a great deal about the rise and fall of Pluto and why the IAU decided to have a debate about Pluto’s planetary status. It seems Jonathan Coulton is wrong: scientists didn’t just invent a reason; the peculiarities of Pluto orbit posed a problem for astrophysicists and the issue needed to be resolved to further the understanding of our cosmic neighbors. But more importantly, I also learned that when Christina is star-struck, her inner child takes hold and she becomes as timid as a mouse in the sights of snake, and I think it is adorable…
For the record:
Christina did not turn any shade of red in the spectrum- she maintained neutral skin tone. I think she maintained her cool as well as anyone could have after their significant other ratted them out to their idol.
As for astronomers inventing reasons:
A reason was still invented. Remember, if you will, that the committee that came up with a definition for ‘planet,’ developed a definition that would have included Pluto. When that definition got voted down, they had to MAKE UP some other defining characteristic that would knock Pluto out simply because the IAU didn’t like the idea of having a whole bunch of planets. (They can do advance calculus, but counting past 8 confuses them.)
Totally unrelated to Pluto or being embarrassed in front of your idol…
What are those little silly icons next to people’s names? And are you assigning them to people who don’t have photos. And how does mine miraculously have a picture but no one else’s does?
wow, i just noticed that little floating amoeba hair next to my post! what is that?
It is a randomly generated avatar picture! Instead of having people with no picture show up as the grey silhouettes you usually see, I set it to give everyone monster pictures unless they are providing one. Perhaps I should change it…
hairy amoeba is better than mystery shadow.
Nicole, if I remember correctly the first committee was trying to make a definition that would have kept Pluto a planet. The problem is that the definition they came up with was too broad and would have incorporated objects like asteroids, moons, and the like. The definition of a planet that the IAU settled on dealt with an object that is massive enough to be rounded by its gravity (check for Pluto), is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion (check for Pluto), and has the ability to clear the debris in its orbit (minus for Pluto).
But, don’t be too troubled by all this fuss: Pluto is still the largest Kuiper belt object and that is something to be proud of, but even cooler still is that Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, can be considered a binary dwarf planet system.
So, I don’t think scientists invented a reason to demote or rather re-classify Pluto. There wasn’t a grand conspiracy to devalue Pluto as a planetary cultural icon; rather they came up with a criteria that can be used determine if a celestial orb is in fact a true planet, for if you include Pluto as a true planet, I believe, it flies in the face of the current theory on our how our solar system formed.
Maybe you and Christina can come up with a new hypothesis on how an icy rock could have formed in the outer reaches of the solar system. It seems to me that the best explanation of the trans-Neptunian plutoids would be that they are just the leftovers of the more massive inner planets.
But I am always open to synthesizing a new view
And on a more positive note: some have speculated that the radioactivity from Pluto’s rocky core might melt the icy mantle creating a subsurface ocean of water that might have the potential to harbor microscopic alien life…
Here is what I would like to find out:
Was it an exceptionally bad weather season in August 2006 when the official vote was taken that resulted in Pluto’s demotion? Because it seems to me that astronomers ought to have better things to do than sit around defining and re-defining words like ‘planet’ that have no real value to us in the first place (as NDT so eloquently pointed out last night). Perhaps that season was hazier than usual, or had more thunderstorms, forcing astronomers away from their telescopes and into rooms to contemplate meaningless problems.
I don’t disagree with the notion that Pluto might not be a planet. But I think it’s a bit big-headed of us Earthlings to presume to be the be-all and end-all of what SHOULD get to be a planet. I also think there are more pressing issues in astronomy… like whether or not there is any life out there to be found.
Which is why I say, Leave Pluto Alone
Now I might not know too much about astronomy, but I kind of have an issue about part of your statement.
You said:
Didn’t we “earthlings” come up with what were planets in the first place? I mean, I don’t think that Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune (and originally Pluto) were handed down to us by the Gods or by some higher-intelligence Alien life-force saying, “Henceforth these things shall be called planets. And you shall not toy with our superior naming conventions!”
I think that somewhere somehow one of us earthlings looked up in the sky and decided to give names to all that shit up there. So why would it be big-headed of us to want to rename stuff? We do that kind of thing all the time to other stuff on Earth. We even change our language!
Planet: from the Greek ‘planetas,’ which means “to wander,” or “wanderers,” or other ways of saying something wanders.
It’s a word that reflects 2 things: 1 – the orbs that moved against the background constellations seemed to have different properties from everything else up there, and 2 – other than wandering, the ancients who came up with the idea of a planet had no idea what those orbs were doing up there.
Historically, this has created many headaches for astronomers. Examples: the discovery of Uranus, the discovery of the asteroid belt, and the discovery of Kuiper Belt objects (before it was determined that Pluto is probably one of them).
I would go on, but a lot of this is argued rather poignantly in The Pluto Files .
I’m confused. Are you offering some cool history behind the stuff, or are you arguing against my “Earthling” thing above? Or are you arguing something entirely different?
I’m just floored that your blog gets this much traffic and comments. NO ONE dares to comment this much on my blog! *sigh*
I’m offering you some history on this stuff, which was intended to show that the problem of what a planet “is” was never thought much of in terms of we-better-define-this until very recently. Ancient (BCE-times) astronomers were not particularly concerned with scientific names for all the stuff up there, and they are the ones that named quite a bit of it.
Christina, I am not sure that is a fair assessment of ancient astronomers. To begin, they were under the presumption that objects in the sky were the domain of the gods; scientific theory wasn’t in their mind set. Moreover, they were , in fact, very concerned about the objects in the sky because they aided in the passing of time as well as navigation.
It should also be pointed out that the ancients would not have thought Pluto is a planet because they wouldn’t have been able to see it “wandering” across the sky, thus as far as they knew it didn’t exist.
In the end, the definition of a planet is man-made and derived from the Solar Nebular Disk Model which gives a hypothesis on how our solar system formed and evolved. It gives some explanations as to why the rocky planets are close to the sun and why the gas giants are beyond the “snow line”. It also gives a possible explanation for the formation of the smaller icy gas giants like Uranus and Neptune.
Having said that, astronomers still don’t know with any certainty how the planets formed. There are still problems and unsolved mysteries such as what causes the loss of angular momentum in the accreted material from the protostar. Further, it is unclear how the core of a giant gas forms fast enough to accumulate significant amount of gas as the protoplanetary disk quickly disappears. And not to mention the whole accretion process of how cm size material coalesce in km size planetesimals.
So, it is conceivable that there are other mechanisms and phenomena at work that will lead to a new understanding and just might lead us to re-evaluate Pluto as a true planet.
Sounds like a great doctoral thesis, eh???
Perhaps…
Although, the current classification does seem to make the most logical sense, all sentimentality aside.