Ntuple Indemnity

The big news at this hour, in the unlikely event you haven’t heard, is Pluto’s demotion to “dwarf planet” status, in a stunning (but appreciated) reversal from the twelve-planet proposal that raised such a brouhaha in the mainstream press.

It’s about bloody time.

Let me begin by saying that I have no sympathies for Pluto as a planet. I haven’t thought of it as one since the day I discovered it was even up for debate. I don’t think I’m wholly uninformed: I’ve had an amateur interest in astronomy since the age of six months. My first book was about space, and appropriately entitled My First Book About Space. I noticed early on that something was off, and that Pluto’s behaviour was markedly different from the rest of the objects that were considered planets: its sheer puniness, its erratic orbit, its mass relative to Charon’s, the mere realization that we haven’t observed it long enough to validate the orbital path that was extrapolated in all of those pretty picture books – the list goes on and on.

It is interesting and aggravating to me that a lot of the coverage about the planetary redefinition cites, as a major source of resistance to change, the inertia of public opinion and the tendency of the ignorant masses to stick to obsolete schoolbooks as eternal, axiomatic truths.

Public opinion is bollocks. The public is inadequately educated on the basic tenets of scientific method and still thinks in terms of epistemological facts and non-facts. Don’t believe me? Take a good look at one of those science textbooks in the States with the utterly idiotic disclaimer that “Evolution is a theory, not a fact,” which is true of everything that we consider science (excluding mathematics, which is founded on abstract definitions and axioms and does not by itself adhere to real-world empirical observations).

Scientists aren’t out of touch with the public consensus. The public consensus is out of touch with science.

As for the scientific opposition to Pluto’s demotion – which is at least based on argumentation and not dogma, but is objectionable for linguistic reasons – I get the sense that what the IAU aimed to do was retain some kind of observable distinction between the eight planets and trans-Neptunian objects (plus the usual oddballs like Ceres), other than some arbitrary statement about where they lie. And let’s face it: Pluto’s planetary status was a legacy concession, and the nine-planet definition was pretty arbitrary to begin with.

On principle, drawing a line around the eight classical planets is no different from how we currently distinguish between the inner planets and the four gas giants. The new “dwarf planet” category (not subcategory) is sufficiently accommodating in spite of some outstanding quirks (Charon, anyone?), as it correctly classifies Pluto as “not quite as much of a planetary object as the other ones” and even provides a useful distinction that separates Ceres from the rest of the asteroid belt.

Given what we know about our solar system and its outskirts today, there’s hardly a Pluto-inclusive definition that wouldn’t be a slippery slope. You might even say that the rejected twelve-planet proposal was jury-rigged to include Pluto for sentimental reasons, and one of the concerns about it was that it would open the door to at least ten other candidate planets, and almost certainly more in the future. The dilution would eventually necessitate a special term for the eight planets up to Neptune anyway, since those objects fall into two very distinguishable taxonomic classes. I like the term “classical planet”, which was bandied about at one point, but “planet” alone is more in keeping with the intuitive connotations of the term.

In the Space.com article I linked to above, Alan Stern from NASA’s New Horizons mission complains that a vote of 424 astronomers out of over 10,000 professionals worldwide is insufficiently representative. This is tantamount to saying that international relations are invalid unless you sit all the governing politicians of one country down with all the governing politicians of another. Furthermore, I’m not sure a direct democracy would have made any difference with respect to the outcome. Science is not a democracy, and I do not think there is any indication that the IAU voters – all professional astronomers – were grossly unrepresentative of the astronomical community at large.

Last week, maverick descriptivist Geoff Pullum of Language Log fame made an entertaining comparison between planetary status and the rules of grammar. I think he illustrates my point pretty well.

Now I’m going to listen to Gustav Holst. He got it right the first time.

It occurred to me, as I observed a balletic display of aurora borealis at 28,000ft on my flight back from Ottawa, that the aesthetic beauty we assign to natural phenomena is not a response to the elegance of organized expression in the space normally occupied by chaos. In reality, the acknowledgment of beauty is triggered by the impossibility of reconstruction. In the eyes of the conservative aesthete, artistic merit is for better or worse measured by the perceived difficulty of producing the work, be it a challenge of technique and craftsmanship or a challenge of human imagination.

Contemporary interpretation dispenses with the subjective value judgment of beauty, opting instead to locate meaning in an incubating social context or history. But it is not invalid to isolate a work and study the system that pervades it, and the most isolable works of art are those that speak for themselves. We are in awe of the cosmos because it speaks to us and begs for a descriptive system of construction as elegant as its singular and holistic illusions, and all the while it knows with a playful cheek that we will never find a total order to our satisfaction.

This is one of the great paradoxes of science. An imperfect approximation is a factually distant imitation. Yet there is the lingering feeling that even a perfect reproduction, which one already admits is unachievable, is incapable of capturing the subjective element that this was something assembled without the aid of man.

The moment we give up on making an aurora happen is the instant we call it beautiful. And in this sense, natural beauty is the upper asymptote at the unattainable limits of human achievement.

On arriving at this epiphanic juncture, some find God. Others find the Disneyland fireworks and say, good enough for me.

First of all, hats off to the many minds behind SpaceShipOne for being the ones to finally do something that is, in many ways, decades overdue – and outdoing NASA in the process. To that end I refer to the launch system, which for a change, did not require dumping a Saturn V in the ocean. NASA has been talking about a rocket-free, reusable launch system for decades – I am personally in possession of a colouring book that predicted a target date of 1997 – but funding cuts and massive organizational problems have left the NASA-driven development of manned spaceflight completely stagnant for the past twenty years. We should be nothing short of ashamed that we are four years into the once-heralded and ever so futuristic-sounding “twenty-first century”, and we don’t even have moon colonies. It’s about time we saw the results of some actual initiative, and my, are they ever results. Space.com has some excellent coverage, including a thorough feature debating the implications of this monumental event.

What does this mean for humanity? Well, aside from the fact that one of the biggest obstacles to the proliferation of manned spaceflight is a government trapped by the reluctance of taxpayers to act as financiers, it means that we may be hurtling towards a different future than the one envisioned by the likes of Gene Roddenberry. It always struck me as odd that space traffic was under such tight governmental control after the formation of the United Federation of Planets. Now, before anybody brings up the counterexample of how Zefram Cochrane’s landmark warp flight in 2061 was a private initiative, or how socio-political factors like a war against an external common enemy (in this case, the Romulan Empire) tends to bring everybody under a single flag, my point here is that under the Federation, private spaceflight all but disappeared. One would think that the private citizens of Earth would have more than just the occasional cargo freighter to call their own.

So maybe even the Paul Allens of the world can’t quite afford a Galaxy-class NCC-1701-D, but Cochrane demonstrated that warp-capable spacecraft were more than achievable – and similar to the method of SpaceShipOne’s launch, it actually beat the government to doing it first. Either the commercial crafts and routes are sparse to non-existent, or we just never see them. Of course, given the little we know about Trekonomics – what, with Federation credits as some sort of abstract currency replacement – I suspect the former is closer to the truth, as far as truth goes in works of fiction. This is not to say that big government is not a solution once the human race reaches a point where a UFP equivalent is possible, but it is certainly not how we’ll get there.

Enterprise, by the way, is a surprisingly good show. I’m a little behind, having not followed it very regularly since the first season (it is now entering its fourth), but it is the only television drama of any interest this day and age. The fact that television generally sucks is a matter worthy of separate examination, and has to do with yucky political stuff like what to do with the CBC. Look forward to it.