Yeah and bizarrely people will become deeply emotionally invested in their childhood knowledge not becoming false even when it has no relevance to their lives or any "social justice issue" Remember Pluto no longer being a planethttps://twitter.com/Nymphomachy/status/1291071654127427584 …
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Honestly we mock Neil DeGrasse Tyson so much for his tireless pedantry but to briefly defend him on just this one thing I think him becoming a lightning rod for "Plutogate" broke his brain He literally got death threats over stating simple, empirical facts about astronomy
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Pluto getting "demoted" because for so long we thought it was the only one of its kind and then suddenly discovered it was just the most visible of dozens of them feels symbolic of something Pluto is the Caitlyn Jenner of trans-Neptunian objects
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Replying to @arthur_affect
There's no such thing as a 'planet' anyway. I mean, all taxonomies are socially constructed, but planet might be the ideal case. Like, what we mean by it is "biggish, interesting place to visit"
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Replying to @mssilverstein
Yeah why would anyone even think of Earth and Jupiter as the same kind of thing
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Conceptually, it didn't include Earth at all, and then for a while, DID include the Sun and Moon. All of which makes sense if you're an astronomer going off limited observations.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect
And eventually, you got to this long stretch where there seemed to be a very nice, meaningful number of planets. It changed with the discoveries of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, but it was still workable.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect
Then it broke down, and they just tried to save it by including orbital parameters, which isn't at all what it's really about in any kind of public or even scientific imagination.
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Replying to @mssilverstein
The guy who invented the concept of "clearing the neighborhood" they used was one of the people opposed to the new definition, saying it wasn't actually an objectively defined quality but one made up for convenience
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Earth hasn't actually "cleared its neighborhood" in any absolute sense, and thanks to the fact that we live here we have quite an exhaustive list of all the trash still in our neighborhood, even if an astronomer on Ganymede wouldn't find it notable
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein
Well that's a can of Discourse to open up The current definition of being a "planet" or not depends the idea of a scientific, objective difference between a "clean room" and a "cluttered room"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein
"It's just a pair of socks, I'll get it in the morning"
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