Pluto is not a planet

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I guess anyone who is working on something radically new, be a product or an idea about the universe, runs into this, that even those closest to us have no sense of why we need to care strongly about how things are defined.

I hobbled back from the rocky beach up to the house. I woke Diane and told her that when the press called tomorrow I was going to have to tell them why the new proposed definition of planet was no good and why, in the end, it made sense all along for there to be just eight planets. I told her that I was going to have to kill Pluto and that Xena would go down as necessary and important collateral damage.

All along, Diane had been more practical than I was. “Just let it be a planet,” she would say. “Try not to worry about it so much,” she had told me all year. “Relax” was her usual advice.

But this time, when I told her that I couldn’t support Xena’s becoming a planet, Diane simply said, “Of course not, sweetie. You always needed to do what’s right.” And then she gave me her usual advice: “Relax.”

Post external references

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    http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/how-i-killed-pluto-and-why-it-had-it-coming/67242/
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