Pluto Should Never Have Been a Planet

I just finished reading Mike Brown's How I Killed Pluto and Why it had it Coming, and it was a fantastic read.  It got me thinking of so many things; scientific progress and history, how the public perceives scientific ideas, becoming entrenched in a way of thinking, distress over change, and how so much of education seems to be storing data in memory rather than learning algorithms (and man for some reason I've really been connecting with my inner computer scientist lately) are just some of the highlights.  It's amazing how much depth there is to the trivial or technical classification details of a rock out there past Neptune.  There's one more aspect of the book that I loved, Mike Brown's humanity in his love for his wife, his daughter, and the sky, but I think I'll write about that in detail later.

I remember when Pluto was reclassified.  Many jokingly consoled forlorn Pluto, kicked out of the planet club by the big boys.  After reading the book I find it odd, why did no one talk about Eris (the Kuiper belt object actually larger than Pluto which theoretically could have been the tenth planet)?  Why did no one bring up Charon, Pluto's moon which is almost as large as Pluto?  Why did no one discuss what exactly it meant to be a planet, and how exciting it was that we were learning more about our solar system in finding so much out there in a whole new asteroid belt out beyond the gas giants, the aforementioned Kuiper belt?

I've groused before on this blog about the dreadful way mathematics is taught, perhaps it's time to get some of that ire up for science as well.  One thing the book made clear is that we all learned that the planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and (as we learned at least) Pluto.  Did any of us ever learn what a planet is?  I think the 'Pluto controversy' pretty clearly indicates no, we didn't.  If we had we would have always found Pluto's planethood a little odd.

Pluto's moon doesn't orbit around it, they orbit around each other.  Pluto's orbit is eccentric from the other planets.  Pluto is smaller than many planet's moons, including Earth's.  To kids and creatives that might make Pluto mysterious and fascinating (it did to Mike Brown as a child), but to scientists and logical thinkers it seems misplaced in the solar system.  And indeed it was.

But no one really seemed to feel that way.  We all sort of felt bad for Pluto, and some people might have even been upset.  I think there's two major components why.  The first is, as I alluded to, the way we learn science.  The next is our unwillingness to accept change.

Thinking about the Pluto controversy I am brought to worry that we are often taught 'the way things are'.  Mike Brown talks about trying to get students out of the mindset of, "Give me the answers I need to know for the test".  The unfortunate implication is that something gets them into this mindset in the first place.  Standardized testing is a convenient and popular target for modern problems in education, but I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention that of necessity it requires students to memorize and later regurgitate facts, and testing any deeper thought processes is at the very least much more difficult.

I read a NYT article that talked about why teaching the difference between fact and opinion like we currently do in schools is morally perilous, as well as simply fundamentally misguided.  It points out interesting ideas, like how teaching children that facts are provable and true causes them to equate truth with provability, even though they're very different things.  I think a focus on 'facts' in science class also carries a dogmatic implication for young students.  Science is always true because we collected evidence for our ideas.  Here's where the distress comes up; Pluto no longer being a planet means facts can change as our understanding does.

And that opens up a whole new can of worms in our minds.  It forces introspection and meta-cognition, in which sadly most of us are loath to participate.  It creates a crisis of certainty, because after all if Pluto being a planet isn't true what other tidbits we learned might not be true?  Doubt is, unfortunately, scary to many.  We're unwilling to change our thinking, to update our knowledge, to print retractions or errata for our memories.  This is why teachings of humility are so important.  They allow us to maintain our sense of self and identity even when we're forced to change our thinking, context, or experience.

A great idea that came together for me when I read The Island of Knowledge is that science must necessarily be the least sure of itself of all human endeavors or reservoirs of understanding.  It must be forever willing to except new evidence or observation which proves previous ideas wrong, and moreover perhaps must forever be seeking these out.  No less than the well known and liked Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently said in a podcast I listened to that the greatest problem is always dogmatism, because it ends a conversation and makes learning from others difficult or impossible.  Let's take this to heart, accept that Pluto should never have been a planet, and rejoice in the fascinating newly unfolding mysteries of that Kuiper belt.

Mathematics is a Godly pursuit

I had this thought after tutoring one day and I've been meaning to write on it for a while.  Many friends and family of mine will be familiar with my love for mathematics and my feelings of anathema toward the apparently acceptable innumeracy of current American culture at large.  While there are numerous arguments on the basis of how useful mathematics is, what a powerful tool it is and how important it is to understand statistics (such as opinion polls or study results) there is another argument to be made.  Like we appreciate art, literature, and other humanities for their inherent beauty and the way they open our eyes to new ways of seeing the world, so should we appreciate mathematics similarly.

Mathematics teaches us (or can if taught and learned with aplomb) humility.  The superior attitude of some of those capable with numbers may seem to contradict this, but this may emulate from the sad way in which mathematics is taught.  An excellent author about mathematics in culture, John Allen Paulos, has often pointed out that math is taught and subsequently perceived as being about computation.  He says that this is similar to saying writing is about typing, and reminds me of a professor of mine saying, "To say computer science is about computers is like saying astronomy is about telescopes."  I will endeavor to avoid further digression about mathematics education, but will point out that when we tell people that they can find a certain answer following a couple basic steps we should not be surprised when they come to believe that they understand everything.

Mathematics is a harsh mistress.  When not teaching algorithms and their application (not a study of algorithms, which is rather enlightening, but instead essentially programming students in a manner shockingly similar to the way a programmer programs a computer to do specific computations), mathematics is about logic.  For the few reading that have actually done proofs, I feel this is a core of mathematics.  Working through with rigor new knowledge and insights from a handful of basic, known, accepted axioms.

What I learned taking a basic concepts of mathematics class (which with a name like that you may be surprised to learn was a junior level college course) is that this process is unforgiving.  One must be utterly cautious and unrelentingly precise.  One must avoid at all costs projecting one's desires, feelings, and possibly even intuition onto their work.  Instead one must choose to strictly follow what is known and established, to do what the axioms and previously derived theorems allow, and nothing more, and to consider every case and possibility

It is this, that makes me say mathematics is a Godly pursuit.  When I say mathematics is godly I mean that it is greater than ourselves.  We must be willing to practice humility and recognize laws that are beyond our instincts, hearts, and preconceptions.  The laws of mathematics do not bend to our desires because we feel they should.  Mathematics isn't a vehicle for our own ideas or agendas, but rather a manner in which we examine how we came to these and whether or not they require additional scrutiny.  Mathematics brings us to truth that we discover for ourselves but are independent form who we are.  Mathematics is bringing something beyond us and greater than us into ourselves.  This is what religion (like mathematics, when it isn't perverted into a degenerate form that is only good for frustrating students or wrongly justifying our preconceptions) does for us as well.

I will end repeating the refrain that mathematics teaches us humility, and this is what makes it at least nigh on divine.  To learn and to do mathematics is to seek knowledge and learn how little we know, what the limits are to our knowledge, and how easily we can err.  Is not such a pursuit godly?

The Truth Hurts, Bring on the Pain!

Thinking a little just now I had the thought, the truth really does hurt. Why? There's more than one reason, I'm sure, but probably more than anything because it forces us to see our preconceptions, our beliefs, our actions in a different light. Sometimes it's with generalizations, a researcher who studies mercury and really thinks of it as his (or her since I live in the blasted p.c. society that won't allow the continuation of linguistic conventions such as using male pronouns as representing a generic male/female person) life's work may be frustrated by people saying most metals are solid at room temperature. He may react thusly, "But what about mercury? Possibly the most useful and important metal because of <> is a liquid, so how can you say that." It might just be denial too. Someone who has strong opinions about or an emotional investment in something requires a good deal of humility, courage, and honesty to admit that something is true when it doesn't match what their ideals or preconceptions are. It could be simple linguistic totalitarianism. Someone who loves jazz may take offense to the comment, "They just played twelve different songs at the same time," though really this comment may have some accuracy if all the players were improvising together. The same thing could be said in a slightly different way that would be fine, "That was amazing, it was like they all played a different song at the same time." This probably comes up a lot in the current political correctness atmosphere.
What I really want to say is that the sting of the truth can be good. We generally mentally flee from ideas that are difficult to sync with our current ones, but we should accept new ideas and consistently revise our current ones. Hearing things which cut us to the quick tempts us to marginalize the speaker, idea, or background from which it comes. The human species must fight this temptation and learn flexibility in our mentalities, conceptions, beliefs, and attitudes. Unlike on our human bodies which is scarred from a cut, a piercing comment to our souls can cause us to improve ourselves. One who is promiscuous will naturally react with offense when he/she is said to be sexually indiscriminate. The best reaction for them is unnatural, to take the comment as a possible truth, analyze their actions and outlooks, and amend them according to how they wish to live their lives in light of this new insight.
"He who takes offense when no offense was intended is a fool, and he who takes offense when offense was intended is usually a fool." -Brigham Young. The offense reaction is an unfortunate one in human nature. It is generally the opposite of constructive and at best leads to festering anger, a grudge against some group or person. Perhaps we as human beings should learn to take the comment, "That offends me," as a comment more about the speaker than the subject. Let he who says it be commenting on his own lack of self-control and hot-headed reaction rather on the heinous nature of whatever the that referred to is. People are wrong sometimes, even then we should seek to understand their thinking, and perhaps change their mind through reason and debate. What we must realize, however, is that change is always hard, especially when dealing with personalities, mentalities, ideas, etcetera. If we are to expect others to do this difficult task with theirs we must be willing to do the same with ours.