The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (14 page)

Figure 6.3.
Letter from Emerson York.

Figure 6.4
.
Letter from Madeline Trost.

Figure 6.5.
Letter from Diane Kline.

T
HE
N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
: P
LUTO
C
RISIS
E
DITION

We quickly see residual anti-Islamic sentiment from September 11, 2001.

M
USLIM
P
ROTESTERS
B
URN
L
OCAL
P
LANETARIUM
“J
UST IN
C
ASE”

We then learn that Congress might have had something to do with the demotion.

L
ACK OF
F
EDERAL
F
UNDING
L
EADS TO
D
OWNSIZING OF
S
OLAR
S
YSTEM

And we further learn the potential impact of Pluto’s demotion elsewhere in the galaxy.

P
LUTO
D
ECISION
S
ENDS
S
HOCKWAVES TO
N
EIGHBORING
S
OLAR
S
YSTEMS

The news of the day would not be complete without partisan politics

R
EPUBLICANS
D
ENY
A
ID TO
P
LUTO
A
MIDST
G
ROWING
C
ONCERNS FOR THE
F
UTURE OF
T
RANS
-N
EPTUNIAN
O
BJECTS

C
AN
P
LUTO
O
USTING
H
ELP
D
EMOCRATS
W
IN
E
LECTIONS
? A
L
G
ORE
D
EMANDS A
R
ECOUNT OF
A
STEROIDS

and Bush accusations.

NASA: B
USH
K
NEW
A
BOUT
P
LUTO’S
I
NSUFFICIENT
G
RAVITY
: O
RDER TO
“O
UT”
P
LUTO
M
AY
H
AVE
C
OME FROM
K
ARL
R
OVE

America’s strained relations with Venezuela did not go unnoticed either.

H
UGO
C
HAVEZ
P
LEDGES TO
S
END
O
IL TO
P
LUTO

You can never ignore any part of the Middle East.

I
RAN
P
RESIDENT
D
EFENDS
P
LUTO
, T
HREATENS TO
R
ETALIATE
A
GAINST
I
SRAEL

H
AMAS
L
EADERS TO
A
PPEAL TO
UN
AS
S
OON AS
T
HEY
F
IND
O
UT
W
HAT
P
LUTO
I
S

H
EZBOLLAH
C
LAIMS
R
OCKETS
C
AN
N
OW
R
EACH
P
LUTO

There’s immigration-inspired politics, too.

M
C
C
AIN TO
G
RANT
P
LANETARY
S
TATUS TO
A
STEROIDS IF
E
LECTED

And persistent claims of discrimination.

“B
IG
-P
LANETISM
” R
AMPANT AT
N
ATIONAL
O
BSERVATORIES
: W
HISTLEBLOWER
U
NCOVERS
B
IAS
T
OWARDS
S
MALLER
, “F
EMALE
” P
LANETS

Related, but smaller headlines follow.

R
EPUBLICANS
S
HRUG
O
FF
G
LASS
C
EILING FOR
D
WARFS
, A
STEROIDS

P
OLL
: M
OST
A
MERICANS
T
HINK
T
HAT
B
LACK
H
OLES
A
RE
D
ISCRIMINATED
A
GAINST

P
LUTO
R
ULING
A
NGERS
D
WARVES
, M
IDGETS
: C
LASS
A
CTION
“D
WARF
T
OSSING
” L
AWSUIT
F
ILED

These headlines are not simply parodies of news but mirrors to the mores of modern America.

Newspapers also serve as the daily repository of public sentiment through their op-ed pages and their letters to the editor. In the
Houston Chronicle
of September 3, 2006, Randi Light wrote: “Pluto was voted out as a planet by a group of astronomers. But I’ve heard that Pluto will run as an independent now.” The
Oregonian
from the same day printed a rhyme by Mike Malter, of Southwest Portland:

Deeply concerned for the demise of America, Gene Lolnowski, of Ellicottt City, Maryland, wrote in the August 31, 2006,
USA Today
: “Our traditional values in this country are taking a big enough beating, and now the IAU wants to mess around with the traditional organization of the solar system. When is this going to stop? This Pluto decision must be reversed. Tradition must prevail.”

Deeply concerned for Pluto’s emotional stability, Marla Warren, from Bartonville, Illinois, wrote in the
New York Times
of August 28, 2006: “I can accept the rationale for stripping Pluto of its planet status. But was it necessary to stigmatize Pluto with a negative label about its appearance? Calling any heavenly body ‘dwarf’ could very well damage its self-esteem. I propose a more positive classification; for example, assistant planet, apprentice planet or, perhaps, training planet.”

In spite of
widespread accusations to the contrary, I had no vested interest in the outcome of the IAU vote. As already noted, the solar system exhibits at the museum’s $230 million Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City did not organize objects by whether or not they were formally classified as planets. So the design and concept was largely immune to what was decided in Prague.

I remind the reader that the IAU does not normally vote on scientific concepts, heated or otherwise. Voting typically addresses non-controversial things like nomenclature that clarifies or unifies our means of communicating with one another. Science is not a democracy. As is often cited (and attributed to Galileo), the stated authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Yet the IAU’s vote to demote Pluto sure looked like an attempt at democracy. Immediately following the vote, many in the planetary science community protested. Some did so on grounds that the 424 voting astrophysicists could not possibly represent the 2,000+ astrophysicists who attended the conference or the 10,000+ world membership of the IAU. Others complained about the limited time made available for the community to mull over the draft resolutions.

Still others—actually, the effort was led by Mark Sykes (see Figure 4.8)—instantly circulated an online petition to allow the international community of scientists to protest the IAU vote if they chose to do so. Reprinted in its entirety below, the petition’s text was a model of simplicity:
³⁴

Open to signatures for the five days that followed the IAU vote, 304 scientists joined the list. The next day, August 31, 2006, the petitioners issued a press release with a swords-drawn opening line:

After a long paragraph citing the impressive planetary pedigree of the signers, the press release called for a new, grassroots, inclusive effort to establish the definition of a planet. The process would culminate in a conference, “not to determine a winner, but to acknowledge a consensus.” The release was signed by Arizona’s Planetary Science Institute and Colorado’s Southwest Research Institute.

Who knows what will ultimately become of this petition? More people voted against Pluto at the 2006 IAU Prague assembly than signed the petition itself. Of widespread concern to the petitioners was that 424 voting attendees amounted to a mere 4 percent of the world’s astrophysicists, so how could the tally possibly represent the informed judgments of the entire community? On the surface, this argument sounds convincing, but most pollsters would give their eyeteeth for their sample to represent 4 percent of a complete population.

So the question should instead be, What are the chances that the vote would be substantially different if you polled all the world’s astrophysicists? It turns out, if you do the math, that the vote’s margin of uncertainty is less than 3 percent, which means that there is a 95 percent (2 sigma, in statistical parlance) chance that if the entire population were polled, the vote would fall within 3 percent of the tally obtained in Prague. The calculation assumes that the 424 scientists are a random sample. There is no reason to presume otherwise, except that people who favor Pluto’s planethood typically exhibit more energy for their cause than Pluto demoters exhibit for theirs. So the 90 percent who voted for demotion may actually be lower than what one might expect for the entire population.

Here’s another way to look at the problem: Suppose the people who signed the petition do not overlap at all with the 10 percent of the 424 who voted for Pluto’s planet status in Prague. This is certainly not the case, but it offers an important, extreme view on what the numbers can tell us. Only 42 people voted for Pluto in Prague. Add that to the 304 who signed the petition, and we get about 350 professional Pluto-is-a-planet supporters worldwide. This figure is a mere 3.5 percent of the world’s astrophysicists. Of course, not voting for something is not the same as voting against it. Most astrophysicists probably don’t care enough about the problem to express an opinion at all. As suggested in Chapter 2, where I chronicle Pluto’s disproportionate grip on the hearts and souls of the American public, the effect seems to be true for professionals as well. No more than 20 signers of Sykes’s petition (about 6 percent), which circulated internationally, hailed from non-American institutions. Yet non-Americans comprise more than two-thirds of the IAU membership.
³⁵