The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (10 page)

Figure 4.7.
View from the Scales of the Universe inside the Rose Center for Earth and Space. The Hayden Sphere, representing the Sun from this vista, is juxtaposed with the gas giant (Jovian) planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, each suspended from the ceiling. Pluto, not being a Jovian planet, does not appear among them. For any given scale, all models are constructed and displayed in correct relative size to each other.

If you want to learn about the form and structure and contents of the solar system, then visit the Planet Zone in the Hall of the Universe. That’s where you will find Pluto, in a transparency, by the way, huddled with its fellow members of the Kuiper belt.

The new Rose Center
for Earth and Space opened to the public on Saturday morning, February 19, 2000. We were not unmindful of the potential for controversy over how we had organized the planet exhibits. But at no time during the hundreds of radio, print, and television interviews I gave—for domestic as well as international media—did our treatment of Pluto come up. I didn’t volunteer it either. Actually, the
New York Post
and
t
one or two other regional papers, in their preview of the facility, noted the absence of Pluto in our Scales of the Universe, but none of them made a big deal of it. The coast was clear. No media controversy.

But that was just the calm before the storm.

Then one day, a reporter for the
New York Times
, on his own time, decides to visit the Rose Center and just have a look around. On the Scales of the Universe walkway, the reporter overhears a child asking his mother, “Mommy, where’s Pluto?” She replies with unjustified confidence, “Check again, you’re not looking hard enough.”

The child repeats, “Mommy, where’s Pluto?” Of course, neither of them can find Pluto because Pluto isn’t there. Meanwhile, the eavesdropping reporter is sure he’s got a story. So he calls the paper, and they put Kenneth Chang on the case. Chang, an eager, smart, young science reporter, does some investigating of his own and files a story for the
Times
.

On January 22, 2001, nearly a year after opening day for the Rose Center, a full news day had passed since George W. Bush was inaugurated as the 43rd president of the United States. The election was controversial. The dimpled chads from Florida’s paper ballots were still flapping in the breeze. One might expect that day’s front page of the
New York Times
to be filled with stories from Washington and elsewhere, chronicling reactions to the new American president.

Page 1 was indeed headlined “On First Day, Bush Settles Into a Refitted Oval Office—He Greets Public After Touring New Home.” But that article also shares space with other important stories, including one on U.S. intelligence estimates concerning three alleged Iraqi weapons factories, another on the pope’s newly appointed cardinals, and still another that reports on California’s race to build power plants so they may avert their perennial summertime brownouts.

And there it was. Page 1. Kenneth Chang’s article on the Rose Center. Appearing in 55-point type was the headline that would disrupt my life for years to come:

P
LUTO’S
N
OT A
P
LANET
? O
NLY IN
N
EW
Y
ORK

The article continued across four columns of carryover, including a photo, and a diagram in Section B.

Chang opened by retelling the frustrations of Atlanta visitor Pamela Curtis, who had to exhume from memory, then recite out loud, the time-honored planet mnemonic “My Very Educated Mother…” to establish that Pluto was, in fact, missing from the display of orbs. Then Chang went for our jugular, portraying our approach to Pluto as both renegade and suspect:
²³

Then came the quotes from the experts. This from planetary scientist Richard Binzel, of MIT (see Figure 3.10): “They went too far in demoting Pluto, way beyond what the mainstream astronomers think.” And this from Alan Stern, who we met on the museum’s Pluto panel: “They are a minority viewpoint…. It’s absurd. The astronomical community has settled this issue. There is no issue.”

But if you followed the article to page B4, you learned that astronomers had been reconsidering Pluto for years:

Buttressing the case was a diagram titled “To Be, or Not to Be, a Planet,” showing Pluto as a midway point between the planets Earth and Mercury on one side, and the not-planets Ceres and 2000 EB173 on the other; its label stating that “Pluto is bigger than minor planets and has an atmosphere,” and yet “Pluto has an unusual orbit and is made largely of ice.”

Chang quoted me in several paragraphs, where I defended our treatment of Pluto. And in the final paragraph, I got to reprise the concluding words from my “Pluto’s Honor” essay with the comment that Pluto would surely be happier as king of the Kuiper belt than as the puniest planet. One of the later remarks came from a scientist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which was building a new space sciences center but would continue to display Pluto as one of nine:

People don’t always read articles to the end. Laura Danly’s candor that Pluto’s classification was a moving target came in the last column. We would later attract Danly from Colorado to become our museum’s director of astrophysics education before she would move once more to become curator of education at the newly renovated Griffith Observatory and Planetarium in Los Angeles.

In the end, it was the
Times
headline writer who got the last word. “Pluto’s Not a Planet? Only in New York” became the takeaway, rather than the more accurate (unwritten) title “Pluto’s Not a Planet? A Growing Number of Professionals Agree.”

So on January 22, 2001, beginning at about 7 a.m., my phone started ringing. My voice mail filled (I never knew before that day the voice mail capacity for our phone system). My e-mail in-box overflowed. And my life would never again be the same.

It’s always a little
scary when the person who hired you calls you up and asks, “What have you done?!” In my case, the fellow on the phone was Michael Novacek, an accomplished paleontologist and the museum’s provost. Keep in mind that I was relatively new at the institution—a youngish upstart in charge of the science content for $230 million worth of the museum’s money.

Of course, the museum, a research institution as well as a place where you find exhibits, is right to be concerned about its scientific integrity. So when it gets dragged through the mud by a page 1 news story about its treatment of a scientific issue, the people on top want to know why. And so, perhaps out of concern that I had strong-armed my own personal view into an institutional posture, Novacek asked whether I had downgraded Pluto on my own or had built some kind of consensus behind the decision. My answer, of course, was that all internal and external members of my scientific advisory committee had reviewed the matter, and the exhibit treatment represented a consensus.

Regardless, the museum sought a quick second opinion from an authoritative source. So Novacek called Jeremiah P. Ostriker, author of more than 200 scientific papers on astrophysics, winner of the U.S. National Medal of Science, provost of Princeton University and former chair of Princeton’s renowned department of astrophysical sciences (where I was, at the time, an adjunct professor), and a recently appointed trustee of the museum itself. What did Ostriker say to Novacek? “Whatever Neil did is okay by me.”

I didn’t learn of this exchange until years later, when Ostriker casually recounted it as part of another conversation. He had treated the media attention like a non-event, the same way Jane Luu had done in the panel debate. To them, the hoopla wasn’t about a scientific question. The organization of the solar system, how the solar system came to be the way it is—those are genuine scientific questions. But the labels you give things—no. You’re having an argument over something you generate rather than what is fundamental to the universe. While you’re sitting around debating, Pluto and the rest of the universe happily keep doing whatever it is they do, without regard to our urges to classify.

Meanwhile, just weeks after Kenneth Chang’s article appeared in the
New York Times
, the same paper published a second article, this one the brainchild of Mark Sykes, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory in Tucson and, at the time, chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. Well aware of the storm brewing at the Rose Center, Sykes sent an e-mail warning me that the division’s executive committee might be drafting a statement rebuking our treatment of Pluto. He also alerted the
Times
that he would be in New York on business and intended to meet with me to discuss the matter—and would the
Times
like to send over a reporter to listen to the conversation? They, of course, agreed.

Sykes came. So did Kenneth Chang, serving as witness and juror, as well as a
Times
photographer. We chatted around my office’s brass coffee table, retrofitted from a 4-foot, circular, contemporary engraving that had been on display among the history of science exhibits of the old Hayden Planetarium. It portrays the long-defunct geocentric model of the universe, complete with Earth in the center and planetary epicycles looping around it. Not to miss a single word, Chang recorded the entire conversation on tape.

The resulting article appeared with the headline: “Icy Pluto’s Fall From the Planetary Ranks: A Conversation,” accompanied by a short piece about the prospects for a mission to Pluto. There’s also a photo of Sykes attempting to choke me alongside the giant sphere, with the gas giants hanging in the background. The caption reads, “Dr. Mark Sykes, left, challenges Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson to explain the treatment of Pluto in the planet display at the Hayden Planetarium.”

Figure 4.8.
Mark Sykes (left) and the author in adversarial, but playful embrace on the Scales of the Universe walkway of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. This photo appeared in the
New York Times
, accompanying the transcript of our minidebate. Sykes, a planetary scientist and, at the time, chair of the Planetary Sciences Division of the American Astronomical Society, threatened to have his division draft a public statement rebuking the treatment of Pluto in our exhibits. I threatened to toss him over my left shoulder into the Hall of the Universe below.

The published conversation reads like a raw transcription, and as we see from this excerpt, Sykes’s views on the matter are unyielding and unambiguous:
²⁴

DR. SYKES
The consensus exists. Unanimity may not, but I think consensus does, and the consensus is that people feel Pluto should not—it’s fine to call it a Kuiper Belt object—but we should not remove its designation as a planet. People are thinking not families, not groups, not cousins. They’re thinking planets….
When people come in, they are expecting to see what astronomers think. What you’ve got up here is not what astronomers think….