The other day, I was going through the whole demotion of Pluto to dwarf-planet status when I used the following phrase: "Pluto is basically a high rizz asteroid". Then, me being me, I had to stand back and admire my own turn of phrase. I forced a bemused smile out of a couple of students for my efforts and then I went back to the delicate disentanglement exercise the IAU had to do in order to demote Pluto. "Clearing one's orbit" seems so arbitrary and unsatisfying doesn't it?
The thing is, we all like to put things into categories. Binning our concepts neatly separates things in our mind. However, nature doesn't really work that way. We got pebbles, meteoroids, asteroids, rings, comets, moons, dwarf planets, planets small and rocky, planets big and gassy, and everything in between. Sometimes a student will ask me "Where does the Earth's atmosphere end?" and I reply with "how close to zero without getting to zero ever do you want to get?".
One of the many reasons I like to teach astronomy is I will spend class time talking about these larger-than-science issues. To name something is not to know it. To name something is to think you know it...
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| AI generated art from the prompt "pluto is a high rizz asteroid" |
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| In case you didn't know, Pluto is just a member of the Kuiper Belt |
"high rizz asteroid" is the most ken thing to say
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