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Jewish World Review August 31, 2006 / 7 Elul 5766 Pluto's demotion as cautionary tale By James Lileks http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | We all took the demotion of Pluto poorly, it seems. Pluto was the scrappy little planet-that-could, the latecomer, the last stop on the way out. Why couldn't they have demoted Mars? Everyone hates Mars; we keep sending probes just to make sure it's not filled with vile intelligent beings intent on invasion. Jupiter is impressive and reasonable; it doesn't throw its weight around, and that persistent red spot — a storm that has raged for 400 years — is handy whenever your teen complains about a pimple that lasts two days. Saturn is beloved for its beauty. Uranus brings up feelings of muted resentment, because we still remember pronouncing it the old, naughty way. (When did that pronunciation change, incidentally? Probably around the time people started dropping the term "anal-retentive" into dinner conversation.) Neptune is just there, a loner. An underachiever, somehow. But Pluto? Everyone loved Pluto. It feels as if we must speak of it in the past tense, even though nothing's really changed. Pluto hasn't left; its demotion does not alter its mass or density. It's not as if it suddenly sped up its orbit out of pride when it was granted planet status in the '30s. But it might as well be gone, and without it the solar system feels like a sentence that has no period. Without that jot of rock, the universe just trails off into an indistinct mutter of planetoids and comets and hobo rocks caught in the grip of the sun. This may be scientifically accurate, but it's emotionally unsatisfying. The politics, however, are clear. As one wag noted, George W. Bush has now managed to lose one-ninth of the solar system. There's truth in that remark; the Pluto debacle does reveal the president's failings. The scientific community long ago decided that Bush's mulish clinging to Pluto's status was a disaster based on cherry-picked intelligence. His insistence on staying the orbit was derided as fantastical delusion, particularly since Pluto's orbit is under constant influence from nearby Neptune. (Which is predominantly Shiite.) Democratic leaders, still smarting from the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision to overturn a Florida law banning the term "dark matter" as hate speech, were in the forefront of the movement to cut Pluto loose. One prominent congressman insisted he was not in favor of abandoning Pluto, just turning our telescopes away so we didn't have to look at it anymore. He also proposed redeploying astronomers "over the horizon," where they could quickly turn their telescopes on Pluto if the need arose. When it was pointed out they couldn't see Pluto if they were on the wrong side of the Earth, he noted that questioning the critic's plutotism was a standard tactic of the "stay-the-orbit" crowd. Hoping to mollify its critics, the administration pressured the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution that would not only assure Pluto's permanent status as a planet, but grant it a perfectly round orbit and an atmosphere. (The French promised to provide 50 percent of the necessary methane.) Skeptics had pointed out that these things were manifestly impossible, but U.N. defenders asserted that the moral weight of the resolutions would be sufficient to compel the changes. The Security Council also voted to condemn any future Israeli probes sent to Pluto, as the landing on the surface would constitute an occupation. In the end, however, the decision was made and forgotten. The planets continued their elegant gavotte, heedless of the names mere humans gave them. People were reminded once again that science is not a fixed thing, but a malleable, evolving set of ideas that adapts to new challenges. Intelligently designed as our science is, we must always keep a skeptical view. One day string theory explains everything; the next day string theory falls from vogue like narrow lapels or rockabilly, and another theory explains this wondrous cosmos. In the end, Pluto is a warning, a cautionary tale. Many things we believe may turn out not to be so, after all. Except for man-made global warming. Only an idiot doubts that one. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. JWR contributor James Lileks is a columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Comment by clicking here. ARCHIVES © 2006, James Lileks

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