Things Joe Finds Irksome: Being Told We Have Eight Planets Instead of Nine

Pluto is a planet. There. I said it. Come on after me, scientific community - I dare you. Your "logic" and your "classificatory consistency" and "your" "reasoned consensus" don't scare me"."

Seriously, though, I think it's fine to call Pluto a planet, even if it's barely bigger than its own moon; even if there are bigger things in the solar system that we don't call planets. If it's in the Oort cloud, it doesn't count in my book.

How come? Because I grew up with Pluto as a planet, and I'm comfortable with it as a planet, and we already have the mnemonic device with it as a planet in place (see previous Joe post). Basically, it feels like a planet to me.

To which you might respond: "Hey, Joe - where're you goin' with that gun in your hand?" And you smirk, because you're sure you're the first person ever to ask me that. Oh you are a clever one, aren't you? Well, guess what - I've heard that one about eighty-five thousand times. And you know what? Sometimes, it's actually funny. Depends on the delivery.

Anyhow, after all that, you stop smirking, and instead raise your eyebrow knowingly, and say, "Well, what about before they found Pluto? Those people grew up without Pluto as a planet, and they seemed to get through life just fine, thank you very much." And I agree with you, sirrah. However, those people are all either dead or like a hundred years old, so I don't care about them.

What I'm trying to say, and the thrust of this post, is this: there's all kinds of scientific truth that we as a society toss out the window in favor of stuff that we're familiar with, and that's okay. In fact, it's necessary.

I'm not talking about creationists, or the global warming naysayers, or the dumb people who think the Earth is flat (the round Earth is a well-funded conspiracy of the globe-building industry, you know.) I'm talking about the received, cultural-literacy-level scientific-mathematic knowledge of educated people. Much of which is wrong.

To wit: parallel lines never meet. Okay. But out in the universe, parallel lines meet all the time, or fan out in different directions. Because the universe is not a neatly-gridded cube. So Euclid gave it a good shot, but didn't quite get it right. And we've known this for well over a century now. Non-Euclidean geometry is a familiar subject for advanced mathematicians. But in fifth grade (or whenever geometry happens), what do we tell kids? Parallel lines don't meet. It's true, more or less, for most Earth-scale calculations, and with things like lines of latitude on a globe. (Another globe-manufacturer conspiracy, perhaps?) So it's a useful thing to be taught.

Or the atom. I'm not sure, but I bet they still teach kids about the parts of the atom: electrons, neutrons, and protons. And they show that nice little model of the little globes going around the big globe in the midd...hey! maybe there really is a giant globe-industry thing going on here! Anyhow, I'm pretty sure that they're not talking about string theory in middle school - that's my point.

The other half of which is, that's okay. Every field of specialty has its body of knowledge. Only a relative few people actually know what's going on in each field, and are actively discovering things and refining previous knowledge in that field. The rest of us don't need to know any of that, unless we're curious about it.

So give us our parallel lines, our centrifugal force, our atomic masses, yearning to quantum leap. And please, let us keep Pluto. I'll let you keep believing that Law & Order is a totally accurate picture of the legal system. Do we have a deal?