« Pelosi - Dumber Than Soap | Main | Hacking Passports »
February 4, 2009
I Hate Neil Tyson
Neil Tyson is the idiot that pretty much single-handedly demoted Pluto from the status of the ninth planet to being just a rock orbiting the sun. I hate him because it's a revisionist history that serves no purpose except to confuse kids so that when they go to the planetarium they can't find Pluto. These are the same type of idiots that think we should convert to the metric system. The ends justify the means and if we just have to confuse the sh1t out of people for a generation or three, then so be it.
Tyson is so stupid that he thinks people feel strongly about the planet because of the dog Pluto. He's an idiot. I just hate the morons like him have the power to rename things and reclassify things on a whim. I hate that they renamed the Starfish to "Sea Stars" and they renamed "Jelly Fish" to "Jellies". It drives me batty. To h3ll with all the revisionism. Let it be.
Posted by Rob Kiser on February 4, 2009 at 2:59 PM
Comments
I can understand why it frustrates you, because it always bothers me when something from history or science gets revised and I don't hear about it until later. Like the forensic evidence that, so I hear, discounts the Donner party cannibalism.
In the case of Pluto, a lot of astronomers started to realize that Pluto wasn't special. There are a lot of large ice-and-rock objects in the Oort cloud, and some of them are bigger than Pluto is. We just weren't able to confirm their existence for some years after Pluto was discovered.
So the number of planets had to change - either there are 8 planets and a lot of balls of rocky ice, or there are something like 14 planets (or more), most of which aren't very "planetlike" when compared to Mars or Saturn or Mercury.
Kids would still go to museum exhibits to find that the nine-planet models were wrong. So the scientific community mulled it over for a while and decided to exclude Pluto, Eris and the other not-quite-planets, since it makes the process simpler. (If they'd gone the other way, we'd still be debating over whether something is a "planet" if it is half Pluto's diameter, or 7/8ths, or a tenth, but made of the same material and orbiting at roughly the same distance ... in short, it would be a pain in the neck to sort out. And the number of planets wouldn't be settled for another decade or more.)
So I have sympathy for your view, but the alternatives to what was done seem even sillier. Kids would have to learn about the new "planets" Ceres and Eris, Makemake and Haumea - and there are another thirty or so "potential" plutoids out there that might be added to the list in the next few years.
Best wishes and all that.
Posted by: Shepherd on February 6, 2009 at 8:55 PM
I believe this was the same twonk who had this crackerjack idea for a time machine...he was on the History Channel...or perhaps it was Discovery...anyway...he was totally off the mark by theorizing a time machine.....using just three dimensions and five senses (strict physical world vs. spatio-temporal). Good gods, WTF? I read on some blog or another that "the brightest astrophysicist under the sun is black!" and had his photo above the caption. No, I believe Michio Kaku to be the brighter astrophysicist here. Kaku makes *sense*, he has a better grasp on his profession....and he didn't revise history for shits and giggles. Kaku can explain the multiverse and other dimensions in a way that the layman can understand it!
Posted by: Saetian on March 31, 2009 at 8:12 AM
I am not worried to much about the kids. They have only one "job" in life: memorize useless information. Few more planet names won't make even a dent in the mountains of nonsense stuff.
And yes, Kaku for president!
Posted by: Uzi on September 1, 2011 at 11:02 AM