Right Wing Nut House

Recent images of Pluto taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Note the change in features - totally unexpected.

Last night, the PBS science program Nova reminded us what a real scientific debate looks like.

Remarkably, there was a kind of political element to the debate as well as pressure groups advocating for one side or another. But the important thing was that there was respect among scientists and lay people for opposing points of view. No charges of one side or the other being in the pay of corporations. Neither side referred to the other as “Nazis.” And yet, there was real passion and belief animating the debate - and a healthy skepticism from both sides that is the hallmark of true science.

The subject of the debate was the “former” planet Pluto and whether it should be restored to its place in the heavens as one of nine “wanderers” (which is what the Greek word for “planet” means), or whether the decision in 2006 by the Astronomical Union to demote Pluto should be confirmed.

“Pluto Files” was hosted by a national treasure. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, has assumed the title, “The People’s Scientist” that had been vacant since the lamented death of Carl Sagan in 1996. He is literally all over the tube these days with appearances on science shows produced for the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel (part of the Discovery Network), Natgeo, and other PBS productions.

I wish we had a dozen Tysons for other scientific disciplines. He, like Sagan, makes the subject matter under discussion lay-friendly. He makes learning fun. He comes across onscreen as approachable, and gives the impression that you can ask any question - no matter how stupid - and he would give you an answer.

His ability to take enormously complex subjects and distill their essence into tolerable, bite sized nuggets of information that everyone can understand is a gift. Or perhaps he works at it more than other scientists. In truth, there is some grumbling among other scientists about popularizers like Tyson. They have the attitude, many of them, that the lay population doesn’t need to know where their billions of dollars are going, what scientists are doing with our tax dollars. They believe that it’s too much trouble to explain to those who pay the bills what their experiments and studies are all about.

This may be true to a certain extent. But there are many scientists who at least try to help us understand the universe and our place in it. Tyson is quite simply, the best.

But it was Tyson who pretty much set off this debate over Pluto’s status by removing the “cosmic body” as he calls it, from the display of planets at the Hayden Planetarium in 2001 when the facility opened. When the New York Times got wind of the demotion and published a front page story, all hell broke loose. Tyson got thousands and thousands of emails and letter protesting his decision. One of them, from a little boy:

Dear Mr. Tyson, I think Pluto is a planet. Why do you think Pluto is no longer a planet? I do not like your anser!!! Pluto is my faveret planet!!! You are going to have to take all of the books away and change them. Pluto IS a planet!!!!! Your friend, Emerson York.

At about the same time, two astronomers who had been looking for other objects in the Kuiper Belt (the location in the solar system where Pluto lies), discovered several round, icy, planet-like bodies - one of which was even bigger than Pluto.

This precipitated a meeting of the IAU in 2006 where the infamous decision demoting Pluto to “minor planet” or dwarf planet was made. In many cases, a decision made by a governing body would satisfy all but the most curmudgeonly contrarians. But for whatever reason - and Tyson offers a few during the show, including the idea that Walt Disney naming the goofy dog after the planet probably contributed to Pluto’s popularity - both the public and surprisingly, hundreds of astronomers objected.

All of this set up Tyson’s journey across the country to unravel the mystery of people’s love affair with Pluto. His trip took him to Harvard where he faced off with a scientist who disagreed with him. He went to Walt Disney World to hug a costumed Pluto.

And then, he traveled to my adopted hometown of Streator, Illinois. Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto back in 1930, was born in Streator and the townsfolk here revere him as a hometown boy made good. Tyson conducted interviews at the barber shop and next door coffee shop with people passionate about keeping Pluto’s designation as a planet. Indeed, the state of Illinois (and Tombaugh’s adopted home state of New Mexico) have passed laws proclaiming that while Pluto passes over those states, it is a planet. I kid you not.

Tombaugh is a quintessential American character. He was a farm boy with no college education who built remarkable homemade telescopes out bits and pieces of farm equipment - real Rube Goldberg stuff. To satisfy his passion for the stars, Tombaugh made his way west and got a job at the Lowell Observatory outside of Flagstaff, AZ cleaning the giant telescope. After a few years, he worked his way up to researcher and the observatory brass thought he would be an excellent choice to look for, what at the time was called, “Planet X.”

Since the discovery of Neptune in 1846, perturbations in that planet’s orbit inferred the existence of another planet. Dubbed Planet X by Percival Lowell, the rich astronomer who built the observatory, a fruitless search ensued for 9th planet for the next 80 years.

Tombaugh turned out to be the perfect choice for this thankless task. He was patient, dedicated, and eager to contribute. It was mind numbingly dreary work as night after night, he would expose photographic plates on the same section of sky and then, using a device called a blink comparator, he would patiently and with great diligence, click back and forth between two developed plates looking for a moving blur in the background.

Tombaugh struck paydirt on February 8, 1930. He confirmed the discovery and then measurements were taken to confirm that Pluto did indeed have an orbit outside of Neptune. His discovery made him world famous and garnered him a scholarship to college. He taught astronomy until his retirement in 1975.

Almost from the start, there were questions about Pluto’s status. It’s weird orbit took it inside Neptune’s for a time. It was very small, barely larger than earth’s moon. And then the questions really began once other Kuiper Belt objects were imaged and cataloged. This led to the controversial IAU decision and some serious blowback from astronomers who have not taken Pluto’s demotion lying down:

Within days of the announcement, a petition signed by hundreds of scientists rejected the IAU decision. On his way back to New York, Tyson stops at John Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab in Baltimore, Maryland, where he meets Alan Stern, a staunch Pluto supporter and one of the world’s leading experts on Pluto. Stern is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission—a nine-and-a-half-year voyage to Pluto, which launched in 2006. Stern’s assessment of Pluto is that it is a new kind of planet, a dwarf planet. “It looked like the solar system consisted of four terrestrial planets, four giant planets, and misfit Pluto,” says Stern. “But today, instead, we see a solar system with four terrestrial planets, four freakishly giant planets, and a whole cohort of Pluto-like objects that turn out to be the dominant class of planet in our solar system.”

The spacecraft New Horizons is streaking toward Pluto, the fastest object ever built by man. It’s current speed is over 38,000 mph and will fly by the minor planet in July of 2015. At that point, we may be in for a huge disappointment. Pluto is so far away and gets so cold that it is very possible that its atmosphere actually freezes and descends to the planet’s surface due to its weight, obscuring any features we might make out. The spacecraft might be blocked from seeing the surface via visible light but the craft also has the capability of imaging in the infrared and ultraviolet as well. At the very least, we’ll get some idea of mountains and valleys that might exist on Pluto.

None of this will settle the debate over whether Pluto is a planet or not. And watching the back and forth between Tyson and those who disagree with him, you are struck by the contrast between those who passionately believe in climate change and the climate skeptics. It makes you wish that the debate over global warming could be carried out this professionally, and with due regard for the scientific process and the welcoming of diverse viewpoints.

It will never happen. The investment of the climate change scientists in maintaining their position is far greater than any astronomer engaged in the defense of the planet Pluto. Still, the debate over Pluto is indicative of real scientific inquiry and not the politically motivated and manipulated results we appear to be getting from climate change scientists.