that whole pluto thing was wild
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2024
- When Pluto was declared a dwarf planet instead of a planet people lost their minds. I think that's pretty interesting.
Btw --- Pluto is a planet. So is the Moon.
Article Discussed:
Moons Are Planets: Scientific Usefulness Versus Cultural Teleology in the Taxonomy of Planetary Science
Link: arxiv.org/abs/...
#pluto #Planet9isjustPluto
I like the soft world of warcraft allusions
Your gold is welcome here.
@@acollierastro Time is money, friend
@@kang4394 kang the decapitator yo
@@ArnaldoMessyDJ For the horde.
Any friend of greymane's a friend of mine
You know what it was like? When people discuss admitting a new state to the Union and someone starts worrying about how it would affect the arrangement of stars on the flag.
They are worried about the power grab. Puerto Ricans like my independista girlfriend think statehood would accelerate wealthy hipster colonization of the island so it would be a state for them not Puerto Ricans. Republicans fear a largely leftist new state and its additional two US senators and congressmen. Corporations would have pay them taxes, be held more accountable for their abuses, and they fund campaign contributions. The one shipping company that delivers 80 percent of their food would lose its monopoly status and could probably not compete effectively in the shipping industry in the international shipping market. Washington D.C. becoming a state is automatically left with two Senators and some congressmen in the house. I have never heard of a person concerned with additional states messing up the arrangement of stars on the US flags.
@@jasoncuculo7035 the thing Matt is referencing is that the pluto debate is like if in the discussion on statehood they ignored all the stuff you wrote out and just focused on the flag.
(btw there should be 53 states, a good prime number so it would be "One nation, indivisible"
@@Tuned_Rockets but prime numbers are divisible by 1 and themself
@@Dacronhai But, you can't split in two, which is seemingly what is happening these days.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
It was devastating...watching Pluto up on that platform, in front of everyone... _them_ just walking up and tearing the stripes right off Pluto's little arm...
I think I remembered watching this exact scene on the telly. That was so moving, wasn't it? Poor General Pluto... After all those years of defending Earth from the Martian invasion, he shouldn't get to be treated like that.
BUT intergalactic war crime is still a war crime, so... 😞
He had it coming, for killing all those robots.
it's pluto's own fault, if it had stuck to being the further planet in the solar system everything would have been fine, but oh no, it wants to wander inside neptune's orbit and draw attention, pluto has no one to blame but itself.
didn't even give him a medal or anything for all those years of service. heartless.
When you did your "2006 rant", it gave me "angry whispering so I don't wake up my parents" vibes. Which is SO early TH-cam I love it.
So *that's* why this video is quiet!
I remember my grandma was very upset and my grandad was very "you're acting like they shot it down, geez"
"Exiting vim is hard" is nostalgia humour. It's not funny because it's true, but rather because being stuck in vim while editing a conf file in your first Linux installation, for instance, is a very common experience. Being able to exit a text editor seems like something you should just be able to trivially do, so it's slightly embarrassing to fail at. It's like sharing stories about kicking furniture in the dark, or getting on the bus in the wrong direction. Vim, though, has the benefit of being part of computer culture, so the joke became embedded into that culture while the internet was still a small place. Now, when you need to use vim for the first time in seven years, maybe you get stuck for a moment, and maybe you share that with a community who you know has also been there.
Agreed, this is why it's funny.
Also, :q is very specific to vim whereas most other cli apps use ctrl c/cmd c. So you can be trying the method you use to exit other programs and getting frustrated.
And this is after you had to learn command line in the first place!
I forgot how to exit vim after only using it in a class and not using it for a few years. So I had to look up how to exit vim.
I wrote a similar comment before scrolling down. I endorse this interpretation.
The other addition is that if you were in Vim and could not exit, you could not use that same computer to search for the answer. Also, they now add how to exit when you do something that would normally exit a program like a normal person. Moral of the story? Use Nano
I might be misremembering but there was about a 18 month period between "we're gonna change the definition of planet" and "this is the new definition of planet" during which time we did the thing that's discussed in the video, having those conversations but it it felt like higher stakes because the decision wasn't made yet, it was all, like, anything goes and there were articles in science magazines about how planets could get demoted, asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects could get promoted and moons could be planets, moons like Earth's Moon, this conversation centered around barycenters. But the question was half "is our moon a planet" and half "under what conditions does the barycenter become part of the new definition". Pluto was definitely on the chopping block the whole time but so was Charon becoming a planet, which makes more sense on the barycenter argument, I think Earth's Moon's barycenter is still inside Earth, so that was the counter-argument, to keep things the way they stayed, which is really a mass argument. The big enchilada was the then-newly discovered big objects in the Kuiper belt, some very much on scale of Pluto, what do we do with them if we continue to discover more and more of them, the whole icy planet category thing mentioned was definitely a vibe for some of that conversation. What actually eventuated was the least wild thing that got discussed. I think the popular consciousness ignores the global perspective on Pluto too, non-Americans do not hype up Pluto as much, many Europeans denied and debated its planetary status back in the day and to an extent this never stopped, and we also forget there was a time in the 19th Century when there were 11 planets, and that conversation and demotion back to 8 created the category of asteroid which I think is a super useful category, I feel like definitions of planets are human-centric, which could be why exoplanets get left out?
You might like the arxiv paper linked in the description. It goes onto a lot of detail on the historical naming of planets, the role of astrology, etc.
Sorry I didn’t get into what you were looking for in this vid!
@@thebrainnetwork9689 That's a good comparison in a bunch of ways I think. It has all the inaccessibility of science (and technology) issues she talked about, while still being big enough to draw people into talking about it and having opinions. Of all the variety of opinions, AI good, AI bad, skynet robot girlfriend metaverse apocalypse, one you hear from virtually no one of any level of understanding is "nah, I don't think it's really gonna change anything". It's also very uncontroversial to say it's going to affect people's jobs, one field after another (which is happening), and everyone cares about jobs.
Your retrospective on the Pluto thing was really interesting, because I actually hadn't remembered that phase where it was still uncertain what was going to happen, and there was lots to speculate about, until you said it. Definitely see that with AI, too. A lot of people get very invested in having an opinion, like there's a feeling that all this discussion is going shape how things turn out, when in reality if you're not C-Suite Google, Microsoft, Facebook and friends, or a stakeholder they're trying to make happy, you almost definitely have exactly zero influence on any of it. But I guess it's that way with most things and we still all have to figure out together how we feel about it at the very least.
Something very true you’ve said is that naming these things are very human centric. We like being the center of the universe. Or we just so happen to notice things around us first and give them names, then later realize those same objects also exist elsewhere. Turns out other planets have moons too, other stars make up their own solar/star systems with their own planets that have their own moons.
America likes Pluto because we discovered it
@@silphv I think AI is a poor analogy, personally. Despite how big a topic it is, almost no one these days knows what they're talking about in the slightest. The amount of people out there ranting passionately based on misinformation is giving the field's experts aneurysms.
Ceres was discovered before Neptune and apparently considered a planet for half-a-century before being re-classified as an "asteroid" (and later in 2006 as a dwarf planet of course).
But yeah, I get the impression they just didn't want to re-classify Ceres as a planet again. "Doesn't clear out its orbit" seems very deliberately aimed at Ceres because Ceres is in the asteroid belt. And the definition they came up with to exclude Ceres happened to exclude Pluto as well.
Every time someone brings up the whole Pluto thing to me now, I tend to use Ceres as historical precedent for the "demotion" of a planet and kinda go "don't be sad Pluto got demoted, be happy Ceres got some recognition!".
Though saying that, at the time of the debates I do remember the possibility being raised of Charon getting promoted to dwarf planet (because of Pluto and Charon's centre of mass lying outside of Pluto) and being excited about that - and then being disappointed when that didn't happen. I'm also still a bit annoyed that the IAU are dragging their feet on Sedna, Quaoar and co.!
Honestly I think the OP's redefinition of planet as "round under its own gravity, no notes" makes a lot of sense - there are many fascinating round things in our Solar System, from Ganymede to Enceladus, from our own Moon to Charon. The only downside is that it would make mnemonics to remember the planets very hard to follow!
@@PaulPower4 you brought up a good point at the end there that made me think of something - maybe part of the issue is that peop[le keep thinking about how it would be taught, so what if we simply don't teach kids about all the planets? I think instead of "there are X planets, this is how they are defined, and this is the order they appear when going outward from the Sun" we should teach kids "here's what a planet is, there are a lot of them, here's some key info on the most important ones" and then talk about like, the main 8 ones for their historical significance, mention the spherical icy bodies and explain their significance or potential for significance, and then that's it. Instead of rote memorization, maybe the whole thing should see some changes.
@@SnoFitzroy Much of our general education today is (regrettably) focused on memorization, and memorizing more planets is obviously harder than memorizing less. So before we can adopt a more sane perspective on representing planetary mass objects in the solar system, we first need to fix education systems.
I think the new definition is really dumb.
What if a star came through our star system and dragged Jupiter and Earth out of orbit around the sun but that passing star did not capture them, so they become rogue planets... except they are not planets anymore because they do not fit the new definition?
What about when Earth was newly formed and it had not cleared away any other objects of a similar size near its orbit around the Sun? Was the Earth not a planet yet and only became a planet later when it cleared that path?
What if Earth were orbiting Jupiter? Would it cease to be a planet?
@@MusingsFromTheJohn00 "Rogue planets" wouldn't be planets per se, because they're not in any close orbit about any specific body which is something we do attribute to a normal planet, hence the "rogue" part is important.
Celestial bodies in orbit undergoing a recent formation are referred to specifically as proto-planets.
If Earth orbited Jupiter it'd be just considered a moon (satellite), otherwise you'd have to be reminded of 20ish more bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium within our solar system.
The current planet standard exist to be consistent with classical major celestial bodies instead of being an expanding collection of 12+ celestial bodies a third of which are both similar and unremarkable.
Still, it's very possible the definition might change to accomodate certain extreme cases which might be found outside our star system, like how there are some active discussions over things like classification of borders between a brown dwarf orbiting a star being also considered a planet.
I remember this being a big thing when I was a kid.
Now I'm in the middle of my PhD, and pluto is one of the first things many friends and family members will ask about, or just make rhetorical comments about.
Please be ready and able to explain why the IAU definition is objectively hot garbage. For the sake of the public. For SCIENCE!
The existence of "rogue planets" also really challenge that definition. 😂
A "rogue planet" or an "exoplanet" is something different from "planet", and not a type pf "planet", according to the definition. Not that I particularly like it, but it's not "that bad" imo.
I think the basic idea was drawing a line somewhere between the classical "planets" and things like Eris and Ceres - saying all these are planets would make things more complicated in some ways (especially for kids trying to learn all the planets).
Separating planetary objects ("planets", "dwarf planets", "rogue planets") from moons is useful IMO - planets being "gravitationally bound directly to the parent star" (I know that's just an abstraction/approximation for complex n-body interactions, but the approximatability seems relevant), and moons being bound to a planet instead.
But what would you do if there were multiple objects significantly bound to each other, but less than to the parent star? In the hypothetical extreme, would an asteroid belt of round bodies be a planet belt? I think this is where the "clears own orbit" comes from.
Personally, I'd be fine with planet belts, calling Eris/Ceres/.../the larger TNOs plantes and just introducing a new "major planet" classification for the classical 8/9 (maybe based on size, or relative influence of sun vs other objects on its orbit), but I'm fine with "dwarf planets" as well.
there's no difference between a dwarf planet, exoplanet, moon etc other than what they orbit, I.E. what big object they're close to. It's kind of like how the difference between a free city, a capital, an aircraft carrier, a cruise ship, a (normal) city, and a city state is just what kind of government the city answers to or has answering to it.
Rogue planets aren’t the most efficient DPS tho, unfortunately
It’s bad because “rogue” and “extrasolar” are just adjectives that describe where an object is. And “planet” is the noun. So a rogue planet is a planet, an extrasolar planet is a planet, they’re just in different environments. But the IAU definition not even including them is idiotic. We need one definition for all planets. We don’t make different definitions for stars or galaxies based on where we find them.
@@alexandrite014Warlock planet gang rise up
The pilot episode of the magic school bus had an epilogue where they discussed how until 1999 Plutos orbit was within Neptune’s orbit so it wasn’t even considered the 9th planet then. I remember watching as a kid and that’s the first thing that popped into my head when the Pluto downgrade swept collective consciousness. They even had a little visual of the crossed orbits.
It was definitely considered a planet in 1999, the reason it got downgraded was because they were discovering a bunch of them outside of Pluto's orbit and didn't want to have to keep updating the number of planets.
@takanara7
This is a media artifact. It was not considered a planet in 1999, or ever. It was mis-published as a planet as it was though to be 100 to a 1,000 times larger than its actual size. They didn’t find out what it looked like until years after it was published as a possible planet-they though it was a little smaller than Neptune sized.
In fact. they were looking for a an object that was “slightly altering the orbits of the outer gas giants”. Which is what they thought they found when Pluto was located. This was wrong, Pluto was not what they were looking for-and they are still looking for the same planet 9 all these years later.
Pluto never was a planet-it was just mistaken for one by people not waiting in the details, they just declared it a planet without supporting data, hence why serious people rejected it; and demanded actual data in support of naming it as a planet. We are still waiting on the data that supports Pluto being a planet. And since it has now been mapped in much better detail, that isn’t ever going to happen.
@@takanara7 Guess you didn't watch the magic school bus episode then...
@@92calebnewman yeah, they called it a planet, and when they describe that they did not describe a planet. Even by their own definition, it never was a planet.
@@92calebnewman so if a textbook about fish Includes cows as examples of fish, you’re just going to accept that??
My first thought was "youre the Jenny Nicholson of physics" then you mentioned a numbered list and that solidified it for me. Adjunct physics instructor here. Love your vids!
She's the Jenny Nicholson of science but her opinions are correct. And also most of the time not opinions
@@noahzstill opinions, just sensibly justified by experience in academia and the compendium of current scientific consensus
@@deyesedAnd math.
"Did people get upset about Pluto because they thought it was funny?" Yes, absolutely. I was 4 in 2006 but that style of humor stuck around for a while (it's still here although its changed a lot) and I definitely remember people doing that with Pluto specifically. The most similar example that comes to mind is the Oxford comma.
I've lost friendships and been turned down for jobs over my refusal to use the Oxford comma. I'm sorry-blame my high school journalism teacher, his style-book and a decade on Twitter cutting out every character possible to fit within that (OG) 140-character cap.
"Airplane on a treadmill" was all the rage when I was in high school. The done thing was to pose that question to somebody who'd never heard it before, and then regardless of if they answered "yes it would take off" or "no, it would stay on the ground" you would argue the opposite side and assure your mark that they must be misunderstanding your explanation.
The Oxford comma is not a joke. It's literally essential to make English sensible
the "I was really busy in 2006" accompanied by WoW music really really got me
I read tons of pop sci growing up in the 00s and Pluto was always my favorite planet, so I was so peeved when it got "demoted." I feel like a lot of people never got past that part of the press narrative.
Looking back, Pluto's reclassification just opened me up to the cool world of Trans-Neptunian objects. When I talk with students and get a question about Pluto (still happens!) I show them a picture of some of the named objects and all the confusion turns into fascination. Why be mad about Pluto when we get cool things like Sedna and Quaoar? 😎
Try to look at it from the perspective of a Planetary Scientist (who studies planets, naturally they need a definition of planet that doesn't rely on location!) and then you would understand why some people are mad. Astronomers don't define planets. Planetary scientists do, and they still mostly consider Pluto a planet, same as Jupiter, or Earth.
@@coolsenjoyer I'm fully aware of all that. Moons can be planets as well. Planets are defined by shape and other intrinsic properties, not things like location. Probably the typical solar system in the universe has hundreds to even a few thousands of planets and moons (and moons that are also planets like Earth's moon) and the sooner the astronomical community admits that reality, the better.
Pluto, unlike Sedna and Quoar has a cultural footprint. Give it another 70 years of SciFi taking place on or having monsters coming from those otherTrans-Neptunian objects, and they may start to have similar standing. Besides, Pluto is a much cooler name.
Pluto was demoted over NASA funding.
The NASA group that gets funding for minor planets and asteroids wanted the funding from the New Horizons Probe; spearheaded the campaign to demote Pluto. Follow the money.
@@remo27 It makes sense that the planetary scientists (myself included as an ameteur) are upset because the astronomers overstepped their boundaries and have been pushing for the wrong definition for nearly two decades! Meanwhile, nobody in the field of planetary science actually uses that definition! They have every right to be upset.
And yes, location in astronomy doesn’t matter. The astronomers know this and never use location for any object in the Universe…except for planets. Why? Because there needs to be a small number?
Just as you eloquently said, experts call large moons planets as well. There’s no real physical difference between Mercury and Luna except location. They’re compositionally identical, or close to it. And rogue planets are completely isolated. They’re still planets, even if they don’t have an orbit. Exoplanets are still called “planets” despite violating the IAU definition, probably because the IAU didn’t even bother defining exoplanets and that may be for the best. They botched it once, they shouldn’t botch it again.
But our solar system has hundreds of planets and many other systems may also have hundreds. Planets could outnumber stars 100:1. Astronomers just need to deal with that and not get so stuck in the 20th century with memorizing all their names.
one day astronomers may identify a super earth that hasn't "cleared the neighborhood" and declare the discovery of a "Dwarf Exoplanet" that's ironically more massive than Earth. That'll be a fun day for the IAU definition.
We already found rogue binary gas giants in the Orion Nebula. The IAU has been real quiet since their discovery. 🥴
I fart in the IAU's general direction. Those douchebags just need to go back to plotting their little nebula positions, predictions of when the next eclipse will be, and whatever else astronomers do for a living. They're not planetary experts and it showed, their definition of a planet is lame beyond belief. Classic case of needing to stay in your lane.
You're absolutely correct, the definition of "planet" is specifically written in order to kick pluto out -- it's a _descriptive_ definition, not a _perscriptive_ one. Pluto is extremely similar to Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, Haumea, Eris, Makemake, Gonggong, and likely hundreds of other plutoids not yet discovered. We exclude them from the list of planets for exactly the same reason we exclude Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. The point of changing the definition was specifically to limit the list of planets to a half dozen to a dozen objects; given that goal, it makes more sense to exclude pluto than include it. Even though, I still dislike it just for the sort of forced symmetry and numerological thinking that motivates wanting a short definite list of planets at all.
@@AJMansfield1 It’s unscientific nonsense. Ironic that astronomers would be afraid of astronomical numbers.
This video was uncharacteristically quiet for you which is fine as I just turn my volume up. but oh man, TH-cam getting rid of the "ad in x seconds" warning was sooo cool ... Literally just had my eardrums blown out by an unsolicited ad
Never gave it much thought, as I also just figured astronomers knew best. It does seem weird that if your orbit wasn't clear, you're not a planet, but then when you clear it, you become one. Also doesn't seem fair that if your orbit is 3,000 times longer than a planet of similar size, you get penalized for not clearing it out as well :P
That's a lame criteria anyway. How well could Mercury have cleared its orbit? How about tiny Mars, which has 1/10th the Earth's mass?
Maybe we could just send a space mission to go clear everything in Pluto's orbit, and get it re-promoted? 🤔
@@cpflames3
Genius!!
@@cpflames3 GoFundMe?
my theory is that the real reason was to reclassify it so that they didnt have to add all the increasingly large number of similar TNOs as planets so they had to come up with another classification to exclude it. and I'm fine with that
I am not fine with that, because definitions should reflect some underlying distribution of reality. It is fine to be a lumper or a splitter in taxonomy but it is dishonest to create arbitrary rules to reach a conclusion that you wanted for other reasons. I am all on board with treating pluto the same as all the other TNOs, but be rigorous about it in a way that is follows from actual principles and can be applied to exoplanetary systems as well. It should be reasonable to someone who didn't know what your real goal was.
It's all a conspiracy from Big Astro. Don't believe it.
This was the reason, they wanted to have a number of planets that it could be easily taught in primary schools, 8 is fine, 28 is not.
Keeping kids interested in space and excited enough to become the next generation of astronomers is actually a valid basis for making a decision. If you don't propogate a love for the topic (and the topic of Pluto's planetary status is one where a lot of public love is displayed) then who knows what quantum crystals will be the next magical 'science' idea to take off...
@@orathaic why reclassify something just to make it easier for kids to memorize? Can't scientists focus on actual, scientifically meaningful classification systems and let teachers and educators decide how to teach them to students?
@@weirdlanguageguy the history of planet classification includes ~11 planets at one point (ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta). But when more asteroids were found "it became cumbersome to classify them as planets"
Same thing with the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs).
And i just learned the word asteroid comes from the astro (star), because the asteroids didn't resolve into planet-like discs, but are so small they appeared as star-like points of light...
"planets must orbit the sun"
So if earth got thrown out of orbit and became a rogue planet and somehow we all survived ... would we not live on a planet anymore?
"Oh isn't it another beautiful day, sorry, night on our cold plan-, sorry, um, lonely spherical hunk of rock?
we would life on a rogue planet. so what of it?
The way science is communicated is not only a like a game a telephone.
It is like a game of telephone with financial incentives to miscommunicate, and social incentives to not correct the other misunderstandings.
You are very good at communicating how disparate incentives affect scientific communications. I hope you keep it up.
In my computer science labs, we would make the "it's hard to exit vim" joke, as a reference to something that's easy when you know how to do it, but the first time, you may have to stumble around to figure it out.
I'm sad that you didn't mention Eris and similar objects that lead to the dwarf planet definition
exiting vim... if you stumble on it for the first time it feels like a trap. ctrl-C doesnt work. Esc doesn't work... There no clue on the screen... what do I do now!? It's kinda funny to think back to that moment. like the monkey that's caught his hand by a box containting a banana. if he'd let go he'd be fine
It’s also often configured as a default so a new user might not even know they’re in vim. At that point what do you even google? What are all these tildes?
Hi Angela! Having lived through this at a different phase of life, I have a rather different recollection of the same events. Back in the day, I wrote a submission to the IAU 3rd division working group (and it probably went straight into the circular file) and proposed a definition that was not close to what was adopted. My set of planets would have denoted most of the circular moons (i.e. rounded by gravity) to be planets, probably all the way down to about Enceladus. The definition that was adopted compares with the well-known aphorism about a camel being a horse designed by committee, but I can say for my part it wasn’t for lack of people trying to suggest a better alternative.
Much of the hullaballoo about Pluto that you remember was obviously driven by the media at the time and for that reason it seems only too likely to happen again, if some other quite popular scientific classification has to change, and this will be recognised with varying levels of scientific understanding in the community. At the time it was obvious that all these new TNO and Kuiper belt objects similar to Pluto had to become planets if the common meaning was to retain any logic; if not, then Pluto had to suffer the same fate that Ceres, Pallas and Vesta did back in the 19th century. Categories are not fixed in stone forever, and that's good.
For example, when I was a child, the brontosaurus was named the brontosaurus. It was a big sauropod dinosaur of the Jurassic era, no problem. At some point in the mid-twentieth century the brontosaurus was deemed to be the same species as another dinosaur that had been classified in the same family, the apatosaurus. So there were suddenly no brontosauri; they were all apatosauruses. In 2015 a new paper has revived the idea that the brontosaurus is a separate genus, but this is not universally accepted (if we can believe Wikipedia, which is always a crap shoot). So the brontosaurus walks again, provisionally. For the brontosaurus, just substitute any other category or identification which the media thinks that the public cares about.
Camels are superior to horses in nearly every conceivable way.
Tell this child that MySpace existed and we didn't have dial up and forums were thriving.
These damn Zoomers.
Well, you’ve convinced me that the definition is not very good!
Can’t really comment on the vim thing because I’m on the comfortable and easy going beach resort that is nano. It seems like getting into vim and not being able to get out seems to be an almost universal experience, so I think it’s just highly relatable
I think the reason people think exiting vim is funny is because the first time most people use vim, they can't figure out how to exit it. I certainly had this experience.
It's not that it's hard. It's that it's confusing the first time. It honestly made me feel quite claustrophobic, especially at a time when I only had one device, and thus could not exit vim to access the internet to find out how to exit vim.
So I think it's just nostalgia for that initial experience, which can be baffling.
:q!
> It's not that it's hard. It's that it's confusing the first time.
That's Linux in a nutshell, honestly. I'm still learning it, little by little. When I need to figure out how to do something, I find the method is frequently unintuitive, but very, very simple. I spend a long time researching, and then mere seconds doing.
@@amzrigh absolutely. This is something Linux evangelists have a hard time grasping to this day. I love Linux, but let's not pretend the barrier to entry is lower than it is.
I actually use vim fairly often over ssh, but still end up with :q typed into the content of files while editing due to typing too quickly / not pressing ESC hard enough for my keyboard to register, or accidentally pressing the q before the : and falling into macro recording mode. at least it's not the unimproved vi :)
I think that's why it was funny yeah. Also though the majority of the time I see it nowadays it looks to me like the funny is 90% based on the fact that it's at least a couple of decades past the point of actually being funny. So the shared experience of beating a dead joke, it's a saying "on fleek" ironically-or-maybe-not-who-can-tell-unless-you're-in-the-in-group moment.
She single handedly added like 20 planets to the solar system... Wow.
Fine by me. 😎
😎@@Jellyman1129
You get the whole "how dare you correct a generalization I learned in primary school" thing in linguistics, too, where the broad generalizations you use to teach formal English and English reading to children or even second-language learners turn out to be just that - broad generalizations or in some cases "an opinion of some dude in the 18th century which makes a great quote". Collectively, I think the reaction is far in excess of the Pluto thing, but because individually there are so many and the reaction is spread out across a person's entire life (and longer, but perspective is important), it can't reach that Pluto Problem hinge point of being a Media Moment.
I think you hit the nail on the head there with the "how dare you correct a generalization I learned in primary school" thing.
We get the same thing in math, especially when it comes to the cyclical hell of 6÷2(1+2) type "problem" going viral twice a year, and people insist that the particular way they learned an order of operations is the objectively correct convention, and all mathematicians are idiots or too soft by saying that it's ambiguous.
You don't have to exit. Just launch another shell from within Vim. Then, if you can't exit the shell, launch another Vim from within that shell etc.
The Russian doll of shells
It's because we all went through that brief moment where we knew enough to enter vim, but not enough to exit it. We assumed it would be the usual "control C" or "exit," but when it wasn't, we panicked. Of course, you could look it up. But at that point we thought we were beyond having to look something up just to exit the program. Am I trying to explain a joke? Yeah...
one of my big pet peeves with media articles on science is how few of them seem to actually link to the scientific paper or press release they're covering (even if it's just a paywalled jstor/research gate/etc. link). Especially if you're reading an older article, it can take like half an hour just to find the paper so you can *start* to read it yourself!
I'm 68 and was mad about astronomy by the age of 10. I had several books about astronomy and the planets including information such as size, mass .... etc. For Pluto it just had ???
That made Pluto mysterious and compelling. Watching the approach to Pluto (New Horizons) was magical ! And that Heart ! Fantastic ! Pluto is still a Planet to me !
You're a very engaging speaker, and I'm also really impressed by your ability to make larger observations about society. "I don't think it will ever happen again where the primary mode of exchanging information about a piece of scientific information is going to be conversation with peers." Extremely insightful, I was taken aback! It's very comfortable to listen to you.
i do stringently disagree with that specific prediction/assessment but i def agree with the spirit of your comment
@@kylezo nah nowadays people will just link to whatever article supports their argument with no further research lol
11:35 "It doesn't matter what it says, you've clicked it, you saw the ads! Capitalism baby!" 😂😂😂😂😂
So I'm not an expert on tacos, but in 2006 every single hotdog was definitely a sandwich, regardless of the pineapple content of any local pizza.
Oh my god I was so happy to see you mention the "moons are planets" article! That article made me do a full 180 on my stance on Pluto, and it made me tread even further into thinking that if there's a dichotomy to be had between the spherical, non-star bodies in the solar system, it should really be between telluric planets (including moons and "dwarf planets") and gas giants. There's a graph in that article (page 53) that shows the shared properties between the different bodies. All the telluric bodies are spread around with a bunch of different properties shared between some but not all of them, and the four gas giants are hanging out together in their own corner. That hasn't left me since.
I agree with my planetary scientist argument that an object being a planet should depend on that object and it's properties, not what is in the space around it. And yes, Ceres should be a planet too. Is a star in a stellar cluster not a star because it moves in a way to cross the paths of other stars around it?
The criterion of having cleared its orbit was always dumb. Most of the planets in our solar system, including Earth, have not cleared their orbits.
@@magister343 I'm sorry, what? Surely you're misrepresenting something? What would a member of the IAU that wrote this planetary definition say to your assertion that Earth hasn't cleared its orbit?
@@dingdongism If we had fully cleared out orbit, there would be no meteor showers.
@@magister343 it's over 1 million times more massive than anything in its orbit
agreeing with dingdongism here. You don't know more about IAU's own definition than them stop it
For me the VIM thing was funny because early on I was told to use it to modify a conf file but no one told me how to exit and there were no clear instructions. Now I know and it's not a big deal to me anymore. I think it's just that shared experience we can bond over
Your definition is simple and elegant. I also appreciate how you incorporate the traditional conception of planets as all those wanderers who do not maintain a fixed position in the sky to justify the more expansive definition.
Debates like "Is Pluto a planet?" "Are tacos sandwiches?" and "Is the ocean soup?" are definitional debates. Regardless of which side wins, we do not gain any new information about the subject matter. This, I believe, is what makes them popular. They are "safe" debates, because there are no real stakes. They can be funny in the same way the Abbott and Costello sketch where Abbott "proves" 7*13 = 28 is funny. By going through a series of seemingly valid steps, one is able to arrive at a ridiculous or counter-intuitive conclusion. In the case of the aforementioned debates, both sides can present solid arguments that result in contradictory conclusions. This is also a meta-joke about the nature of debate itself, since the tools needed to win a debate are not the same as those needed to determine the truth of a statement.
The ocean would be more like a stew, with all those vegetables and meaty chunks in it, right?
@@jaydee4397maybe not since the ocean doesn't cook everything in it.
It is still a stew if it hasn't been cooked? I don't think so. Haha
Pluto was clearly being size shamed.
I like how it was explained to me by an astronomy teacher I had a few years after the big event. I think CGP Grey's video touched on it too. Basically, the definition resulted in fairly nice and tidy categories of solar system objects-you got the rocky inner planets, then the asteroids in the asteroid belt, then the gas giants, then the objects in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, and finally the satellites orbiting all the rocky planets and gas giants. Pluto just seems to fit in well as an unusually large Kuiper belt object. I think it's fair to say the definition should be more scientifically rigorous though.
I agree with Dr Collier on the vast majority of things, but in this case I don’t understand why she thinks temporal and spacial context doesn’t matter for this definition. I understand that “rogue planets” don’t have to take these into account, but I’m also fine not calling them true planets. I think planets are important because of their context within a solar system. Not that they are “large, non-star bodies”.
@@cptobvius She doesn't seem to have an issue with the term "Rogue Planet" being context sensitive.
i genuinely think the definition is all about making sure the solar system has a nice small number of planets. if we consider pluto a planet, there's a bunch of other stuff in the solar system that should also be considered planets, i guess somebody somewhere was upset about that
Yeah, they wanted it to be possible to print up a nice short list for children's placemats and such. Can't do that if there are 300 planets in the solar system. But reality doesn't care about our children's placemats...
It sort of divides it into clear domains doesn't it? Each for 8 planets. Asteroid belt not Ceres domain. TNOs KBOs OORT etc. Makes it fit into neat areas that are somewhat regular patterns doesn't it.
“ oh dear we are making new discoveries, let’s hide them “ . That only really makes sense if planetary scientists deep down have a bit of astrology hanging around somewhere. New elements, exoplanets , elementary particles, animal species or fossilised animals are celebrated not awkwardly redefined away.
Yeah, I 100% agree.
Right. It being classified as a planet occurred at a time when we didn't realize how many other similarly sized objects are spinning around out there.
I want to say something positive: You are awesome! Thank you for the great videos and the way you are and/or represent yourself
Maybe since Neptune and Pluto-Charon are in resonance they should be re-classified as a trinary planet.
The Sun hasn't cleared its orbit, so that makes it a dwarf star :)
Well the sun orbits a black hole, which is a star
It’s spherical
And it HAD a cleared orbit until we found out about Oumuamua back in 2017
I've really enjoyed these videos. I hope when I go back to college to finish my degree I can find someone like this to talk about such things with such thoughtfulness. It's nice.
A lot of the vim jokes that I've seen have been in the context of "text editor wars". Which yeah, is the same sort of thing as AVGN and "console wars" etc. Like even on Google if you google "vi" you get "did you mean emacs" and if you google "emacs" you get "did you mean vi?". My opinion (and lots of others') is that we know vim is objectively better than anything else, but has a big learning curve since all of the commands go against muscle memory learnt from any other experience with Windows or Mac computers. With that said, vim is my go-to if I'm using command line, but if I can use a mouse I'd rather use vscode.
So Vim is a text editor?? Im still confused lol
It's not "objectively better" if even exiting the program is a part of the learning curve. Especially not when it's something that could be improved but wasn't, be it because of elitism or nostalgia (and both are big problems in computer science circles).
i was also a kid in 2006 so i wouldnt have had the greatest awareness of stuff going on but I remember the pluto thing being mostly a meme, in a "nooo my childhood was a lie" sort of thing basically just driven by nostalgia bc we all learn about the planets in the solar system pretty early in school. Kind of similar to how some people reacted to learning that dinosaurs likely had feathers, bc it made them seem less cool and scary (those people are wrong btw dinosaurs having feathers is fantastic). it was also something more people would be aware of bc kids were aware of it, I remember in elementary school the teachers were always not really sure if they should teach us about pluto like they were used to and theyd usually do something like include it in the list of planets but say yeah its technically not a planet anymore. I think people still discuss scientific news with each other just like before, and have "debates" over silly things that are just fun to argue about like whether a taco is a sandwitch or not. I think its just harder for scientific news (and any kind of news really) to stand out now compared to the past, we mostly get our news from the internet's 24 hour news cycle so theres just so much more news we see on a daily basis than when we just got our news from tv. anyway i wish more of the public scientific discourse was like this and not like, conspiracy theories about vaccines and climate change.
@Jon, it hurts: It might also be nice if the public scientific discourse thought about for longer than five seconds the kinds of things that would and wouldn't make conspiracies a likely explanation for things, instead of just using the fact that some theory has conspiracies as part of its subject matter, or even is just loosely associated with the kinds of things people call conspiracy theories, as an automatic reason to refuse to have any discourse on or further exploration into the issue, despite the fact that doing so, as science is so famed for doing, would increase the falsifiability of the theories involved and thus further and deepen our connection with the real world, whether that would mean using the findings to increase the purported likelihood of the theory to be true, or using them to decrease it.
"Kind of similar to how some people reacted to learning that dinosaurs likely had feathers, bc it made them seem less cool and scary (those people are wrong btw dinosaurs having feathers is fantastic)."
One day, many more people will develop the morality to avoid wanting dinosaurs to seem scary, but that day, unfortunately, just hasn't really come yet, although, on the bright side, there are some mentors in this comments section that would have the expertise to help those morally challenged individuals.
@@derekg5563 people can be overly dismissive to ideas or questions that are conspiracy theory adjacent (people can be pretty harsh towards those genuinely asking questions about Covid stuff bc it sounds a lot like the stuff Covid conspiracy theorists say or “ask” disingenuously) but for people who are legit into conspiracy theories it’s not a matter of being misinformed it’s a psychological thing, someone into a conspiracy theory likely isn’t into just one bc they are just a person prone to conspiratorial thinking. Those tendencies usually come from a more emotional place like having distrust and criticism of the government, a legitimate feeling that gets misdirected, or the desire to feel like you’re unique bc you have this special knowledge, or to be part of a group where you all have this secret knowledge no one else has. Doesn’t help that some conspiracy theory groups can be predatory and target vulnerable people like someone who is lonely with low self esteem and would be enticed by being in a community and being made to feel special. You can’t logically argue with people like that bc they aren’t operating by logic.
@@BlisaBLisa , ALL people can be (and usually are) overly dismissive of new ideas. From Psychology Today, 2010:
'Why do people so tenaciously stick to the views they've already formed? Shouldn't a cognitive mind be open to evidence ... to the facts ... to reason? Well, that's hopeful but naïve, and ignores a vast amount of social science evidence that has shown that facts, by themselves, are meaningless. They are ones and zeroes to your mental computer, raw blank data that only take on meaning when run through the software of your feelings. Melissa Finucane and Paul Slovic and others call this "The Affect Heuristic," the subconscious process of taking information and processing it through our feelings and instincts and life circumstances and experiences ... anything that gives the facts valence-meaning ... which turns raw meaningless data into our judgments and views and opinions.'
by David Ropeik, an award winning Science communicator and Journalism professor in an article titled;
"Why Changing Somebody’s Mind, or Yours, Is Hard to Do" subtitle,
Our opinions are castle walls, built to keep us safe.
regarding feathered dinosaurs, to paraphrase Randall Munroe XKCD, people who think feathered dinosaurs aren’t scary have never tried to fight an ostrich
For me, it was like people were trying to mess with my head. I was a grown ass person and the two science things I was interested in as a kid were dinosaurs and space. Nine planets was burned into my brain. I honestly didn't find out Pluto had been fired till maybe 2010 or later when I ended up in this weird moment where I nearly got into a heated exchange with a very intelligent friend at the uni bar. It turns out, it's just because I'm an old fart who stopped paying attention to random news items, while a lot of my social circle were university students a decade or so younger and had just been exposed to the information in the natural course of school. Eight planets just sounds so wrong. Sometimes people get mad because they think people are trying to mess with their heads. And to make matters worse, if someone tells you the issue is too trivial to be mad about, then you feel like "well then why did you feel you needed to change it?"
Seems like there was no dramatic revelation to justify it. I think Mr Mike Brown had some monkey on his back and took it out on Pluto.
I think the main reason pluto got kicked out was because we want to keep our 8 main planets but if we extend that definition to something that includes pluto we have to include the other 150 rocks that also qualify as dwarf planets and our main 8 bois will not sound so special anymore
- "and our main 8 bois will not sound so special anymore"
See that's not the reason, though. The reason it because otherwise, you effectively have no classification scheme at all. When everything is a planet, nothing is.
@@zackakai5173 no, you do. it's just that that classification includes the other 150 rocks, so instead of 8/9 planets you get around 160. So my question to you is where is the line?
I appreciated the mention of paywalls. I had to do my first research project in my first semester (first generation student) and it was very depressing to find that everything on Google Scholar that seemed vaguely relevant cost at least $40 just to look at. I eventually found a good source on the college site but it took a while.
It reminded me of how legitimate news sites are mostly paywalled (another problem with the same course and just life in general), while most/all news sites of dubious origin are free and plastered with ads.
Is it any wonder that we have such a disinformation problem?
I've seen a few popsci article that mention planetary scientists' criticisms of the IAU's definition, but like you said, a lot of popsci seems to prioritize mass-producing soundbites over accurate science communication
I really like your planet definition. It's internally consistent. That's always satisfying. It's also interesting to watch this after seeing you talk about science crackpots.
You've convinced me (a high school senior) with the 2006 talk to stop using my phone around others forever to rekindle that conversational energy
Pluto being demoted must have had a huge impact on the astrological zodiac... Maybe that's where the peanut allergy came from 😂😮🙃
Re: 16:30 jokes about exiting the Vim text editor -- why are they funny? I think people find them funny because they're poking fun at the supposed inferiority of new Vim users who are used to Microsoft Notepad or maybe Nano, and who did not bother to run Vimtutor (or even to read the splash screen), and who don't understand the concept of a modal / non-GUI / non-WYSIWYG editor, and who would rather sink in stupefied frustration than read the manual (I think most of those jokes are older than Google being a quick way to get useable info about a niche topic).
Also, for many of us who find those jokes hilarious, there is a twinge of sympathy because we remember the first time *we* heard about how wonderful Vim was, and we tried it... and we couldn't even enter any text! And we said, "Well, this sucks, I'm going back to Notepad"... and we couldn't even quit the program! (Most of us don't have what it takes to be astrophysicists.) So for some of us, it's funny because it happened to us, and we have to laugh at how stupid we were. (Better than crying about it.)
In my case, I figured that if so many people with proper grammar were recommending Vim, then maybe it was worth a second try; and after working through Vimtutor some 15 years ago, it is now really painful to use any other editor, such that I install it on any Windows computer I have to use more than once or twice. (At organizations where installing software requires special permission, IT departments are usually very happy to help install Vim, in my experience.) And I still find the jokes pretty funny, even though the punchline is always the same (and even though I certainly know to use ":x" to save and quit).
There's another group who make jokes about how hard it is to exit Vim -- people who kind of hate using Vim, because it is so counter-intuitive (maybe they grew up on Atom or Front Page or VS Code or etc.). So they're making fun of how bad a piece of software is Vim, and Vim users are making fun of people who won't take the few minutes needed to read the directions, and both camps think the jokes are at least mildly entertaining. Not sure which camp your computational physics colleagues are in. (But, yes, at root, it's kind of a dumb joke. The Three Stooges of computer geek humor, maybe.)
Or maybe it was a joke?
I am 100% here for this dedicated analysis!!
The stack overflow blog did a good job of explaining why it's a question to begin with. The biggest reason is that git drops you into vim. Web devs who never use a terminal who get dropped into vim have no idea how to get out.
@@123370 Oooh, that is interesting.
Yes! Another great rant expressing all my feelings about the 2006 planet definition. And yes yes yes for the Metzger paper, which is the most sensible thing written on this topic. Thanks and keep up the great work!
The fun thing about the icecream and drowings is that, yes, corelation does mean a causation.
It’s not A -> B, but C -> A & C -> B. It’s a single cause for both datapoints. All sufficiently long corellation chains can be traced back to a common cause.
I thought this was going to be about why Mickey Mouse has a dog named Pluto, who can’t talk, and his best friend is a dog named Goofy, who can talk.
It is because Goofy is a planet and Pluto is only a dwarf planet.
I think the attempt to rigorize the definition of the term "planet" just isn't that important for scientists at the end of the day. Pluto is still a term that refers to a fixed object in the solar system, whether we call it a planet or a "dwarf planet" (how important is this subcategory, btw?) is basically arbitrary. "But we have to have a scientific definition for the word whose greek origins literally means 'wanderer!'" Actually no. I certainly don't, anyway. Neither do most people, and, as a matter of fact, probably neither do most astronomers. We could just arbitrarily say, "the definition of a planet is X (whatever the specific technical definition of planets is), +, for reasons having to do with the historical development of solar system astronomy, Pluto."
"But why would I grandfather Pluto into my astronomical definitions?" Because history is a thing, because there's more than one domain that concerns itself with the question of what Pluto quote unquote "is," and because astronomers don't actually have a special authority in the naming of things or the semantics of terms. This is, very technically, the domain of poets, actually. In this specific case, scientists absolutely overstep their bounds by claiming to be able to dictate the common usage of language itself.
Put it another way, I neither presume in my usage of the term "planet" to impose this definition upon the IAU (they can construct their taxonomies however they like), nor do I accept their authority to impose their definition upon myself. There is an irreducible political element to linguistic change, it isn't enough just to change the dictionaries (although, of course, that is an enviable tool to have at one's disposal).
Best comment here.
It all comes down to 1 thing. They realized that there are hundreds of objects in the Kuiper Belt just like Pluto, and they didn’t want to add hundreds of objects to the roll of planets in the solar system. So Pluto had to go.
Yes, they didn’t want schools kids to memorize too many names. It’s baffling how unscientific their motive was. They should be embarrassed.
My problem is that we were taught "Mother Very Excitedly Made Jelly Sandwiches Under No Protest" in elementary school to memorize the planets. Now kids are going to have to say "Mother Very Excitedly Made Jelly Sandwiches Utterly Nude" and that's not appropriate.
Grade school children should be made to learn that Pluto is a planet and just to bust their stones they should also be made to learn the names of the other 2,000 Kuiper Belt objects that we have discovered so far. The defining line on whether Pluto should be a planet to me was when Neil deGrasse Tyson explained that if Pluto was at our orbit distance from the Sun that it would have a tail , and that was no way for a planet to behave. Thank you for the video and thumbs up.
Just discovered this channel last night and I love it. You’re like the science nerd version of Big Joel, which is legitimately a great combination :)
thats such a good analogy
7:35 "Imagine you're a normal person" LOL
It is pretty obvious what happened.
There were a load of other objects discovered bejond Pluto.
And in the beginning, they just went "Yah those are too small to be planets". But then some objects were larger than Pluto.
And the society was dead set on NOT giving anyone the honor of having discovered a planet. They could just not deal with that. So they met with the express goal of finding some definition that would exclude all those objects and stop people from claiming to have found a planet.
That is the whole reason. It had nothing to do with Pluto. Pluto was just the sacrifice they were willing to make in order to prevent more plantes from being discovered.
The better way is to define a basic noun and descriptive adjectives. First, a planet (N) is any clod of matter that is gravitationally bound. Next, define a bunch of adjectives that tell the rest of the story:
- dwarf
- spherical
- cleared
- rocky
- hydrophillic
- gaseous
- living
- etc...
Agreed!
Classic planet for the 'official' ones?
-i got excited about Eris and Haumea and all that.
-dwarves are people too. Dwarf planets are still a type of planet i guess.
- happened before with Ceres.
-Annoys me that large moons can't get promoted, like, why isnt Ganymede being bigger thab Mercury a "planetoid" or something. Instead we get 100 or so jovian bits of rock with same status.
-Hapoened before with Ceres (and possibly Vesta and other asteroids, cant remember!) Now that was a long time ago!! But now i know about Ceres!
- I don't like the naming inconsistency with major gods of the Roman pantheon being all over the place. We should be inclusive of gods of death , harvest and hearth/home or whatever, they're the major olympians or something!
That article is a really great read, it was worth my two hours when I found it a year or so back ^^
But yeah, the whole Pluto thing is weird to me, because on one hand, (speaking as someone who was admittedly on the "it is still a planet" track mainly because of that third grade nostalgia thing until finding said article) the general sentiment of "well they're wrong because I don't like it" feels bad to me, and another possible contributor to like, public opinion turning against science in a way that's led to a lot of the nonsense conspiracy theorist stuff that's so big today.
Meanwhile, until finding that article I couldn't really articulate the problems with the definition so I felt like I had to reluctantly go with it. But on the other hand, I just generally really don't like the sort of, dismissive Sheldony tone a lot of the anti-Pluto people tend to take when they talk about it. "Well they said it so it's right, you ignorant phillistines, get over your nostalgia and get with the real world!" Like that's kind of an exaggerated version, but still, that's the kind of smug vibe I usually pick up, which makes the doubling down in spite in the face of that, feel a bit more understandable to me, idk. So I kinda agreed and disagreed with both sides of the argument simultaneously; my gut reaction was saying "Pluto Is A Planet, dammit", and then I checked myself and went, "No, the scientists know what they're talking about, so just deal with it."
---
And then I read that article, and it really clicked for me. I have mixed feelings on that my petty Third Grade nostalgia was evidently vindicated, but I'm still not going to complain too much.
For one thing, realizing the conference that voted on it was like, general astronomers and not actual planetologists, just made the whole thing weirdly make more sense to me? Like no wonder the decision and definition was so weird and arbitrary, this is like a chemist without much Particle/quantum physics experience trying to redefine quarks out of existence or something.
Then there's the fact that planetologists were saying that like, the important factor was more whether something was geologically active in some form, and a funky venn diagram with all the different categories of types of that, and which planets and moons had which ones. So that was really interesting to learn, along with the realization that hey, moons can count as planets too, which actually made a weird amount of sense and was easy to accept for some reason? (Which like, I think, I think that last part ties into where I'm going with all this.)
---
But like, the big thing that got me, was learning the real main unspoken(?) motivation behind all this, the existence of the other trans-neptunian objects past Pluto. And it's like, despite what the IAU may claim to the contrary, this whole thing was very much a Demotion, not a sidegrade, with the intent of curtailing the amount of recognized planets at just the eight, because I guess going into the double digits was too much or whatever. And that in of itself just feels kinda fundamentally wrongheaded; science is a process and we're always discovering new things, so why are we just like, saying "no, the buck stops here" in the first place?
Like, it is functionally putting a premature stopper on Planet Hype, for lack of a better word. We have the eight, we don't need any more, anything else we find around our system is only a Dwarf planet, and thus beneath the general public's notice. They're not the headliner events going into third grade textbooks anymore. The idea of Planets in this solar system? Is stopped. Done. No more. And that, I feel, is like, cutting off a free and easy source of science positivity for no good reason other than, ironically, the sort of reactionary traditionalism that pluto supporters get accused of.
Imagine if the narrative was not "Pluto isn't a planet anymore" but "Look we have a few more cool planets for you to fall in love with!" I guess the controversy got more attention overall, but that doesn't make it any less a negative-sounding headline, and a net negative for science communication IMO. For me at least, back in like 2014 or so, learning that there were these other Trans-Neptunian objects past Pluto, also named and also with their own quirks and interesting elements, again was far easier to accept and become interested in, than the idea of Pluto's demotion. So when anti-Pluto people point to them (and Ceres in the asteroid belt, and Jupiter and Saturn's bigger moons) to be like "well if Pluto is still a planet, then these ones would have to be planets too! >:(", my only response is "Exactly! :D" On the same grounds that I still think of Pluto as a planet, I have accepted them into the fold as well, and keep thinking it's rude that they're still being excluded from the current third-grade textbooks.
Sorry for the essay in the comments. You were wondering if this whold controversy was a joke to most people, and I don't know either way, but I'm one of the people who's legitimately really (prolly disproportionately) opinionated about this.
Wise man once said, "Buff, don't nerf."
I was a physics major in undergrad when this happened. People did, in fact, lose their shit. I went to a talk on the coronal heating problem (can't remember if that's the real name for it...I didn't end up sticking with physics) and I remember that Pluto took over the entire discussion.
Correlation does not equal causation is something that _does need to be constantly hammered home._ Not necessarily because the scientists aren't aware of it but the conflation of the two phenomena is so common in the general public discourse.
Also, causation is hard to establish and often under-evidenced at time of publication.
Another great video. Like you, I was also very busy in 2006, for what seems to be identical reasons. I always assumed that the first criteria was "orbits a star" because it didn't occur to me that a group of scientists could be so sloppy as to just say "Sun". But I just looked it up, and that really is a red flag for how little care was taken in the definition. Perhaps that was hopelessly naïve of me, as a physical *organic* chemist that studies *aromaticity*.
Also, I am sure that your shirt says "PLUTO", but that was not the first thing my brain read it as at 22:07 O_O
The big problem with Pluto being a planet as far as I was told was actually that there was no useful line that included Pluto that didn’t include Ceres and a lot of other bodies in both the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt, and it is useful to have a category for things in the solar system big enough to teach to kids, so that we can teach kids about the solar system without having to say that there are hundreds or thousands of planets.
Making things easy for kids is not a scientific concept. Chemists don’t limit the number of elements, biologists don’t limit the number of species, and planetologists don’t limit the number of planets. You can still say Pluto is in the same category as Ceres, Eris, Haumea, etc. without making memorization mandatory. We don’t memorize all the galaxies and stars in the universe, why do we need to memorize the planets? There are thousands of them, just get used to it.
We teach kids about animals without mentioning every single species and that doesn't shock anyone.
Do kids have to memorize three million rivers in the world? Or 1,187,049 mountains? Or 195 countries?
The easier fix would be to just declare that Ceres is the 10th (or 5th?) planet, because it dwarfs all the other asteroids in size and is as big as Pluto, while excluding the Kuiper belt for being too far away and are thus exoplanets or something.
Instead, they had to bend over backwards trying to redefine Pluto out of the running by inventing the comical "dwarf planet" definition which does include Pluto, but not Charon or Ganymede.
@@pax6833 The Kuiper Belt is still bound to the Sun, so any planets there would be well within our solar system and thus not exoplanets.
But I certainly agree with Ceres being counted as a planet. It definitely towers over all the asteroids. This is especially true for Pluto as it’s 14x more massive than Ceres!
But the Irrelevant Astronomical Union just HAD to create a new definition that was specifically engineered to exclude Pluto and its siblings like Eris and Sedna. “Dwarf planet” was coined by Alan Stern in 1991 to mean “small planet”, just like how “dwarf star” means “small star” and “dwarf galaxy” means “small galaxy”. But the morons at the IAU botched it and misused to term to describe a completely separate object, even though objects like Pluto have all of the same physical attributes as planets. Then they refused to “officially” add any more of them. Where’s Gonggong, Orcus, Sedna, and Quaoar? These objects are definitely large enough to be spherical. Why not add Charon? It’s technically a binary companion of Pluto rather than being strictly a moon. Why not add Triton? It’s still a dwarf planet despite being captured by Neptune. Why not add Enceladus? It’s small and has the same interior structure as other dwarfs.
I think it’s wise to just ignore the circus of fools. The planetary experts already do and use a completely different planet definition that makes way more sense and was created by peer reviewed data, not arbitrary votes. We don’t need an authority to rule over astronomy and tell us what objects are “officially” counted. The IAU doesn’t own space.
New Horizons launched in 2005. I remember when my dad pointed it out to me in the newspaper. We were sending a spacecraft to Pluto, the most distant planet - and it'd take ten years to get there! I was ten at the time, so from my perspective New Horizons would take a literal lifetime to achieve its goal
Then Pluto was demoted. This far-off rock, formerly one of the few planets in my very own solar system... was no longer special. It was no better than a dumb asteroid
New Horizons sent back its images many years later. I set my profile picture on all relevant social media to the first black and white image of Pluto. All my friends thought it was the Moon, but... no. Obviously not. The Moon doesn't look like that
Pluto is special because it was very relevant during my lifetime. It was an unexplored frontier, so distant as to be unattainable but yet so close to us. Reclassifying Pluto was dumb
I recall a friend pulling a prank in 2008, where several hundred colored paper flyers were posted around college campus announcing an event celebrating that Pluto was going to be reinstated as a planet. The announcement included the tidbit that free pizza was offered. On the scheduled time, several people showed up, expecting pizza, but there was no actual event.
I really appreciated the moment of vulnerability around the humor of "exiting vim is hard."
Back In My Day We Had Nine Planets.
your overall vibe is like the jenny nicholson of science communication
im glad to see someone else with the same impression after finding this channel lol
the mannerisms and cadence are *very* similar
I think a large part of it is that Pluto being one of the planets is one of the few things most people know about the solar system, since they were forced to rote-learn the planets' names as children. I wonder if you could provoke a similar reaction if you made sensational news items about removing one of the colours from the colour spectrum, or changing the order of BIMDAS or something...
Orange doesn't belong on the rainbow! Cyan was robbed!
I contend that "demoting" Pluto, rather than making its discovery (by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930) less important, made it more important.
Because instead of being merely the 3rd modern discovery of a new planet, it was now the *first* discovery of a whole new category of Solar System object! (a KBO - Kuiper Belt Object)
Fred
I think a lot of people, on some level, just enjoy arguing, but a lot of the things people argue about, like politics, they can also get genuinely angry about it, and it isn't fun anymore. But with something like Pluto, people don't actually care enough to get genuinely upset about it, so they can just have fun with the arguments
He makes my skin crawl. NDT needs a daytime talk show wedged between soap operas. "Had it coming?" He is almost projecting malice onto a specific group of matter.
tell me you've never done that after bumping on something
The taxonomy of planets reminds me of the whole Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus thing (which is apparently still going on), but that felt more esoteric I guess? Planets retain some of their pantheonic qualities, maybe. Also, yeah, why not move the goal posts etc?
Sometimes it seems like some comment objections about correlation are directed at the article itself, the end product of the game of whispers. Often people are dismissive of all the work done, or of the work that usually goes into science itself, but sometimes it feels like a reaction to the feed we're given because we, like you said, can't spend the time to go much deeper than what filters through all of these layers of interpretation, and they might be trying to disaffect the crowd that's rushing in to read the article. I notice it's usually directed at the science when the conclusions or suppositions overlap with political tropes (and they often get that sort of attention because they're framed in a contentious manner meant to engage). That framing can mess up the conversation, like you were saying.
I guess it might be better if the originators of the findings could be more involved in how these things are put out there. Not sure if there's a way to do that without a big time cost, though. Maybe it already happens for some of the bigger announcements?
Brontosaurus is back since 2015. Yes, I think some still dispute the classification.
My favorite was: "That's old news, like, when Pluto was a planet."
Ok, I'm watching this at 1:50am, unable to sleep and suddenly I hear the WoW login screen and I felt like I was transported back to 2006 doing the same thing except waiting for the game instead of listening to a fascinating TH-cam video
As someone who has a interest in linguistics and astronomy, the whole "pLuTo IsNt A pLaNeT" thing makes me insane. The word planet is right there in the new designation. Honestly, they kinda just made it official how special Pluto really is. ♥️
Special how? It's not like it's the _only_ dwarf planet. That was kind of the whole point.
Oh and I disagree that "the term _dwarf planet_ has the word _planet_ in it" is quite the mic drop you think it is. If your interest in linguistics has never introduced you to terms like _silverfish,_ _black water,_ _Tasmanian tiger,_ _fool's gold,_ or _sea anemone,_ let's just say, those are not actually types of fish, water, tigers, gold, or anemones.
Dude. Love your realness. Your better than me about letting yourself be vulnerable on camera. Also I never questioned the new planet definition before but that totally makes sense. Great vid. 👍
There was a time when you really wanted to know enough vim and emacs to be able to exit correctly, because you could end up with your terminal screwed up and not be able to do anything at all on the computer until you somehow reset your connection, losing all of your current state. Kind of like if you had an app get hung with focus, and your only option is to reboot, losing all of your unsaved work in the three other apps you were working in. Fortunately these days terminals are windows and you aren't using a primitive manual connection, so usually you can just close the window rather than having to figure out which escape codes correspond to which bit of connection tech you are currently using.
I can't tell whether vim or emacs is worse. Emacs has the downside of treating every combination of keystrokes as something valid, so while you're trying to figure out WTF is going on, maybe you're telling Emacs "Go to my home directory and overwrite everything with lorem ipsum". vim was in some ways better because it was very file-focussed, but if some program dropped you into vim when you weren't expecting it, say when you assumed something else and were typing away, you can end up in a pretty random mode. So you have to know things like hitting ESC to get out of some mode or another.
Usually you can C-z out of either, but ... sometimes that would leave your terminal in a crazy mode, like no-echo or something. I know how to fix that, but most people at that point just have to burn down the terminal and move on.
This video raises a good point. The definition especially the "sweep out its own orbit" part is rather weak. None of the inner planet did this. It was done for them when the sun ignited or by jupitor (see grand tact hypothesis). Are the inner planet really planets? Ofcourse they are.
As our telescope technology improves we may be force to redefine what makes a planet a planet.
Don’t forget about rogue planets, which have no orbit. How do we define them? We should define all planets by their intrinsic properties only regardless of their orbits, like she said. It’s a very good video.
2 issues arise for me, today, long after the public discussion:
1. Pluto not being a planet becaus it has not cleared its orbit is a bit? Neptun hasn't cleared its orbit either - since there's pluto.
2. That there was a vote to decide planet status was a really bad thing. What's right and true in science should never be a majority decision. It's often the case in scientific development that only a minority gets it right or dares to improve upon a flawed but widely accepted theory.
Honestly the biggest issue I have with Pluto getting demoted is that it was obviously done to avoid having to name/classify a slew of Trans-Neptunian objects. OK cool, I guess if Pluto has to be sacrificed for the sake of simplicity I can see the value in that. Unfortunately within the same year Pluto was downgraded they discovered SEVEN new "moons" orbiting Saturn. Previously to this whole Pluto thing, I'd never really thought to question the definition of celestial body, but when I looked at some of the things we're calling moons I was APPALLED! Don't even get me started on some of the natural satellites orbiting the gas giants, looking at Phobos and Deimos it's frankly insulting that those hardly spherical glorified captured asteroids get to share a classification with our beautiful Moon!
And again, if I accept that the point of demoting Pluto was to avoid muddling the list of planets in our solar system, well what muddles things more, this weird sub-class of planet of which we've found one novel and agreed upon entry since the induction of the classification, or "moons" 62 of which were attributed to Saturn alone THIS YEAR (2023)? For further context, currently the IAU has only officially confirmed 63 of Saturn's now 145 moons.
This is CLEARLY a significantly bigger problem than whatever the IAU considered the Pluto problem to be and yet there's complete inaction on the issue! Something MUST be done!
1:26 she's looking for Pluto behind her now, soooooo adorable......
The reason it happened was people discovered a bunch of new planets out past Neptune, and one of them, Eris, is actually even bigger than Pluto. These Trans-Neputian Objects (TNOs) or Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), there are dozens of them, many similar in size to Pluto. The astronomers had to debate whether to let them all be planets just like Pluto, or kick Pluto out. You can look up lists of dwarf planets and see ones like Eris, Haumea, Makemake, etc., as well as Ceres which is in the asteroid belt. I think what everyone missed in the discussion was how they just discovered a bunch of cool new planets but instead of calling them planets like they should have done, they demoted all of them to this new thing they made up, dwarf planets, and then they had to demote Pluto too, to be consistent.
Anyway, the real reason isn't they had anything against Pluto, it's that they were discovering dozens of other planets just like Pluto in the outer Solar System, and if they officially called them planets, we would have an ever-expanding list of planets in our own Solar System that would get taught to kids, and we would know that there are probably planets in our own Solar System that haven't even been discovered yet and that the list is incomplete. And that would be too complicated for most people, having dozens of planets and an ever-expanding list. But I think that would have been more interesting because then we could regularly have stories about new planets being discovered and people getting really excited. Demoting Pluto and barring the rest of them from being considered full planets, classifying them as dwarf planets instead, makes a certain amount of sense, but that was mostly done just so the list of full planets in our Solar System would be a stable list that doesn't change ever again.
As far as this Vim thing, Vim is just really annoying to use and doesn't have an obvious self-explanatory interface like practically every other program. You have to look up how to do everything online. With almost any other editor, you can just start using it immediately without any difficulty because the interface is obvious. People make jokes about it because of this obvious difficulty. Apparently people who get used to using Vim often end up actually liking it once they have its interface memorized, but I don't have the patience for that and I don't like memorizing useless information like the shortcuts for a program I don't intend on ever using. A program you can't even exit without looking it up online, that is a normal thing to make jokes about because the frustration is universal for everyone who has used it. I don't know why but apparently some people still use Vim regardless of its bizarre interface. Good for them I guess? I would never use it unless I were forced to, though. One of the first things I do in any Linux installation is change the default console-mode text editor from Vim to Nano because Nano is a million times easier. Then I can bypass all of Vim's nonsense and never have to deal with it again, because pretty much any other text editor is just SO much easier to use.
I think it does make sense to call Mercury a planet now even if it is expelled out of its orbit in a million years. Things are temporary
Mathematicians spend every waking moment arguing about definitions... Definitions are really important
I turned nineteen in 2006. I had a MySpace page lol
I grew up being able to recite our planetary names in the correct order even before my teens. Pluto was removed when I was 42 and I felt odd about it, like a victim of theft.
I distinctly remember a 2019 afternoon when my friends and I fake argued for hours whether EVERYTHING in this world can be classified as a salad or a sandwich, and if yes, which is which. Like let's take a population of a country. Is it more a salad, in that it has a bunch of different ingredients mixed up together in a bowl (=borders), or a sandwich, because it has different ingredients stacked up in layers (=social hierarchy), stuck between slices of bread (=borders)?
You can also have phenomena that are salads made up of little sandwiches and vice versa, which is neat