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if mickey's a mouse and goofy's a dog, what's pluto?
10/22/2009 = 09:04 AM

An open letter to Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Dear Dr. Tyson:

I'd have sent you this communication via email, but your website indicates that you have a backlog and are not accepting new emails.

Pity I didn't know about this when I was unemployed last year. I would have answered your emails for you for free whilst job hunting.

Anyway.

I just finished reading your latest book, The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet.

I'd like to start by stating no one asked my opinion on that. My favorite planet is Saturn. It has the best bling. (Yes, I know the other gas giants have rings, but Saturn was first. Fashion-forward and all that.)

I'm sorry. Off on another tangent.

In the '70s, my mother got told she was no longer a secretary, she was an administrative assistant. This meant she still had to make the coffee, but they would pay her more to do so. I have a reason for telling you that. I'll get to it in a bit.

Back to the whole Pluto brouhaha: I never blamed you for that. I already saw it starting to become a questionable issue back in the end of the twentieth century and I decided it was all Harold Levison's fault, because Pluto wasn't fitting in neatly with his beloved accretion theories relative to the distance from our Sun.

Besides, I like your wardrobe. As you can tell from my choice of favorite planets, I do indeed judge a book by its cover a lot of the time. You have that nice celestial waistcoat, and those four-in-hand neckties with the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy, respectively. Hal Levison wears bolo ties. The only scientist I ever liked in a bolo tie was Isaac Asimov, and he's dead.

I am not a scientist. Like most spectators, I love to watch the game, but can't actually play it.

When I look at the night sky, I see beautiful shiny things that open my mind to possibilities and make me aware of the universe and my role, however insignificant, in it.

When I look at textbooks, I see applied physics and equations that my same open mind cannot comprehend, and I feel isolated by my ignorance.

I'm okay with that. I have other fine qualities, one of which is a deep, abiding fondness for the English language, such that I can say, in all confidence, that you might want to fire your editor before the second edition of The Pluto Files is issued.

I saw an instance of "you're" when you meant "your," "line of site" when you meant "line of sight," "shoe-in" when you meant "shoo-in," and my personal favorite, "Ellicottt" when you meant "Ellicott."

You may trust me on this as I trust you on matters astrophysical.

All that having been said, I am going to weigh in with what I said about Pluto back in 2006, in a podcast that, sadly, is no longer available online. To paraphrase myself, I had said that, as I was learning the geography of my very own planet, the one on which I live and have a vested interest in being able to navigate, I have frequently had to unlearn stuff about such places as Czechoslovakia (and after I'd gone to the trouble of mastering its spelling) and the Soviet Union, which got re-Russia-ed within a week of my having purchased a lovely new Earth globe that was, at that point, rendered completely obsolete.

Pluto was, in a nutshell, the least of my concerns. Thanks to Hal Levison, I started thinking about a new mnemonic back in 2000 and was already using it by the time you had opened up the new exhibit at Hayden Planetarium:

"My Very Enterprising Mother Joyfully Strings Unusual Necklaces."

1. Which would, presumably, take her mind off of still having to make the coffee.
2. What's unusual about the necklaces is that, in my mind's eye, they each had merely eight beads.

My only reason for caring about Pluto's planetary status, I concluded in that defunct podcast, was sentimentality, not for Pluto itself, but for its discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, who is currently affecting our own planet's gravitational spin by turning over in his grave.

If I were he, I'd be saying things like, "I didn't sit there in front of that blink comparitor till my butt fell asleep and my eyeballs bled for this, dammit."

Since he's not here to speak for himself, I propose on his behalf that we go all corporate and politically correct in one fell swoop by taking a page from my mother's employers back in the '70s, and declare anything that orbits something else to, by this criteria, be known as "support."

Earth would be "solar support" for our Sun.

Our Moon would be "terrestrial support" for Earth.

Pluto, which sort of does figure-eights around its own moon, Charon, would therefore be supporting two "departments:" it would be "solar support," like Earth, but it would also be "lunar support" for Charon, which, in turn (no pun intended), would be "plutonian support" for Pluto.

Oh, hush. It makes about as much sense as anything anyone else has suggested, and it creates such a tone of equality.

When you stop laughing, please feel free to respond to this, assuming you ever see it. I hope you do. Again, I'm a fan of the game, and in case you couldn't tell, you're one of my favorite players.

In all seriousness, I loved The Pluto Files. It's one of the best books of any genre I've read all year. Well done on letting me, as your reader, see the shiny things in the sky and feel, for a moment, as if you and I could have an intellectual conversation.

Sincerely,

Golf "Curse You, Hal Levison" Widow

Tags: Pluto; Neil deGrasse Tyson; planet

drinking: nothing
listening to: nothing
to my non-science-minded readers: read this book. i totally understood it, so you will, too