There Goes Pluto!

     After much wrangling, the International Astronomers Union has demoted Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet."  Does it matter what we call it?  Maybe not.  It brings Walt Whitman to mind:

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
   in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add,
   divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured
   with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

    Which, in turn, leads back to a couple of lines from the Tao Te Ching:

If you give up learning, troubles end (20).

The knowing are never learned
and the learned never knowing. (81)

    There is always knowing beyond our human learning.  We create categories and concepts in an attempt to explain the universe, the Way, but these ideas are partial and flawed.  If we focus too intently on individual things, the "planets" in and of themselves, isolated from their context by our human-made analytic frameworks, we risk blinding ourselves to how all things relate to one another in infinately complex and beautiful ways.

     Names matter less than presence.

Comments

[melektaus]

I found your op-ed in the China Daily on this topic to be much nonsense.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bjweekend/2006-11/10/content_729492.htm

First of all, you do not understand that controversy regarding the criteria for planet-hood.

It's not that astronomers didn't have a precise definition of "planet." They did. The problem is that under *that* definition, many newly discovered "heavily bodies" would need to be classified as planets.

But that would cause pedagogical confusions, headaches and other practical difficulties.

So astronomers have chosen to arbitrarily restrict their criteria for planet so as to exclude these bodies but in so doing, they excluded Pluto by implication. That on balance, is worth the cost most of them argued because that causes fewer confusions and headaches (or other practical issues from arising).

Both the previous and present definitions of 'planet' are precise.

You've completely misunderstood the basic problem. You also misconstrued the rectification of names but that's a whole other story.

I leave you with this from Confucius:

"'What is wisdom?' The Master replied, 'Wisdom is maintaining that you know when you know and maintaining that you don't know when you don't.'" [my translation]