Patellin' you about Planets

While a lot of my friends are having incredible summers doing everything from volunteering at an orphanage center in Cambodia to interning with major accounting firms in New York City, I'll be spending my vacation time slaving way for a single test: the MCAT. As some of you reading may already know, the MCAT preparation books, courses, and the test itself ($240!) are quite a toll on the bank account. So at the start of my summer break, I ventured down to the local library to see if they had any MCAT books to check out for extra passage practice. Unfortunately, the most relevant study aid the library had for me was "Biology for Dummys."

After spending the next 10 minutes looking for ANY book to make up for the lost cause I grabbed "How I Killed Pluto" by astronomer and Caltech professor Mike Brown. I remember (nonchalantly) reading about Pluto's demise as a planet a few years back, not bothering to understand the actual reasoning behind that (apparently) ground-breaking decision.  Being an indifferent sophomore in high school, my rationale was that Pluto was just too damn far. I chose this book in particular though because I've become a huge fan of astronomy and physics the past few years (more on that in the future). However, the only knowledge I possess is the layman's version not involving any complex mathematics, mostly the conceptual framework. I figured Mike Brown was one of many scientists who had claimed to be the ambassador for the case against Pluto in order to get his 15 minutes of fame. I didn't really care about him individually - I just wanted a more in-depth explanation of poor Pluto.


Fast forward to two days later: I ended up finishing the whole book. I was hooked after the first chapter. Mike Brown is a LEGEND in the field of planetary astronomy as well as a fantastic writer. He pokes fun at any previously held stereotype I had about astronomy and physics professors by showing off an amiable personality through his writing. What amazed me the most was his incredibly insight into the inner workings of science. I want to spend some time explaining the facts and theories that were the most memorable. As many of you may understand, I only seem to recall the overall message (or the fate of the major characters if it's fiction) of meaningful books I've read. A reason I created this blog was to record the more insightful passages in my reading. So let's start by me Patelling you a bit about Planets:

The original ancient Greek meaning of the word "planet" was "wanderer." This nomadic definition fully accounted for the discovery of all the earliest planets. People looked up in the sky and noticed that almost every object remained stationary each night except for a select few: the "planets." Obviously then, the first planets were the most visible ones: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the moon (HA) and the sun (HAHA). Planets and astronomy were considerably more interesting to the public and the hierarchy of the sciences in those days. Did you know that all the days of the week were named after them?

Sunday, Mo[o]nday, and Satur[n]day are the most obvious, while Tuesday through Friday are more than a bit obscure. Tiw was an ancient Germanic god of war, as Mars was to the Romans, so Tuesday is actually Mars's day. Wednesday is Woden's day. Woden was the carrier of the dead - a Germanic grim reaper - fulfilling one of Mercury's less well known jobs. Thor was the Norse king of the gods, like Jupiter, and Friday is the day of Venus in the guise of the Norse Frigga, the goddess of married love.

When even MORE objects in the distant sky (asteroids, moons, comets, galaxies) were discovered, systematic classification rules were defined for literally every kind of object in the sky. "Craters on Mercury have to be named for deceased poets; moons of Uranus are names for Shakespearean characters." All this time, my ignorant self just thought that these obscure objects would instead be named after Battlestar Galactica characters.

Now I don't want to bore you with how astronomers used to look for new potential planets (and their moons) but the meticulous approach boils down to just a more technologically savy way of the old-fashioned "wanderer" method. They look through the lenses of giant observatories, analyze all the data with extremely expensive equipment, and then write computer programs to account for any pair of frames in the images where a single dot in one frame has moved (or is a little less dim) in another. That right there was probably an oversimplification of about 50-75 pages of history and (not boring) detail - but that's basically what happens.

What is more interesting though is the linguistic and philosophical debate over classification in any branch science, "When is something a mountain instead of a hill? A river instead of a stream? A lake or a pond? An ocean or a sea? Geologists never attempt to define these things. The words simply mean what people think they mean when they say them." They are defined simply by tradition. Take the term "continent" - Brown literally walked around Caltech looking for answers about a concrete definition and never got a satisfactory reply. Every explanation contradicted itself. Why is Greenland not one while Australia is? "It has its own continental plate." Well continents have been around much longer than the tectonic plate theories of the 70s... With that definition BOTH New Zealand and India should be their own continents.

As I quizzed more and more people, I learned, for example, that many Europeans do not consider Australia to be a continent. Argentinians consider North and South America a single continent. And rational people in many places believe that Europe is considered a separate continent only because, well, that's where the people who defined the continents in the first place all came from. Can it really be that the most important classification scheme for our understanding of landforms has no scientific basis whatsoever?

How all this relates to Pluto and Mike Brown's career in Part II.