How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [95]
The first question from the press: “Dwarf planets are planets, right?”
No, I explained. The resolution was pretty clear. There are eight planets; dwarf planets, of which there might be hundreds, were clearly not planets.
But how could something be called a dwarf planet yet not be a planet? they wanted to know. A blue planet is a planet, right? A giant planet is still a planet. A dwarf tree is still a tree. How can a dwarf planet not be a planet?
Such is the beauty and frustration of definitions, I suppose. But I agreed that it seemed a poor choice, and an odd phrase to make up out of the blue. Something seemed suspicious. Still, the resolution was clear: There were only eight planets. If the astronomers voted yes on Resolution 5A, Pluto was clearly dead.
“But what about Resolution 5B?” someone asked.
I hadn’t gotten around to reading that one yet. I turned to the screen.
Resolution 5B: Definition of Classical Planet
Huh? “Classical” planet? It was the Pluto escape clause! Resolution 5B simply changed the word planets in the previous resolution to classical planets. There would now be eight classical planets and four dwarf planets. With the quick addition of one word—classical—in front, dwarf and classical simply became different but equal subsets of the overall category of planets. Suddenly, dwarf planets were planets after all. The committee had indeed tried to sneak Pluto back in. The odd phrase dwarf planet had been invented in the previous resolution to allow the possibility that Pluto could rise from the underworld to live again.
Like the previous resolution, this definition was also muddled. Why “classical” planets? Shouldn’t the phrase classical planets refer to those known in the classical world? In Greek and Roman times, there were seven planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and also the sun and the moon. Earth was not considered a planet, since it was the center of the universe. Uranus, discovered in 1781, and Neptune, discovered in 1846, were a few thousand years postclassical. Calling the largest eight planets “classical” made no sense at all.
I explained to the journalists in the room the now overly complex possibilities of the vote’s outcomes and what the fate of Pluto would be in each case. Finally, the question came: “Do you think Pluto should be a planet?”
I sighed; it would have been thrilling to be considered the discoverer of a planet. “No,” I responded. “Pluto should not be a planet. And neither should Xena. When Pluto was discovered in 1930, there was nothing else good to call it, but by now we know that it is one of many thousands of things in orbit out past Neptune. The vote today would rectify an understandable mistake made in 1930. Going from nine planets to eight planets would be scientific progress.”
By 6:00 a.m. in California it was 3:00 p.m. in Prague, and the assembly was about to start. We were going to eavesdrop on the vote courtesy of a jumpy, low-resolution webcam broadcasting the event. I found the link for the webcast, clicked on it, and projected it onto the oversized screen behind me for everyone to see. It ended up filling an area of about one square foot. If you looked closely, you could see inch-high astronomers filing into the room.
Much of the next hour is a blur in my memory. After we watched an Austrian barbershop quartet there were nine hundred new members to be voted in and the first four resolutions to sit through. It would be a long morning. I muted the sound and opened the floor to questions, of which there were many. I can’t remember a single one. On the tiny video, we could see people making speeches and raising yellow cards to vote on Barycentric Time. Someone finally brought me coffee. The first four resolutions quickly passed, with little discussion and without a single vote of no.
Finally the text for Resolution 5A appeared on the screen; we quickly unmuted the video stream and listened in. The once-secret committee, now beaten down by other