On Pluto

Ok here's the deal.

I have had no less than fifteen people ask me my opinion on the Pluto thing and I know I'm the resident science nerd but honestly people, I don't want to repeat myself anymore, so PLEASE STOP ASKING ME WHETHER OR NOT I THINK PLUTO SHOULD BE DEFINED AS A PLANET.

I am not an astronomer and I don't pretend to know what's the best method of classification. The International Astronomical Union did not go with the definition I thought they would, but that's fine with me. I know we all grew up under the definition that qualified Pluto as a planet, but after the discovery of 2003 UB313, the only choices were to have more or less planets than the traditional nine.

If they had gone with the definition that allowed for Pluto to remain a planet, then at least fifty discovered objects in our solar system would have qualified for that position, and this doesn't include those objects which have not been discovered but almost assuredly exist unseen in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. And my god, my mom's third grade students can't even spell some of their names right, let alone remember the names of fifty planets (My Very Elegant Mother Just Sometimes Understands Networking Problems, But Anyway As I Was Saying Maybe We Could Go Grab A Bite to Eat And Get Some Elephants Some Peanuts Even Though They Are Allergic And Then We Could...etc). As a matter of fact, defining Pluto as a planet is rather like taking a single candy from an entire package of M&M's and calling it chocolate bar, simply because it was the first one you grabbed.

And really, this sort of holding on to Pluto is a bit like clutching a pacifier beyond a reasonable age; we must wean ourselves from old paradigms as we discover new ones, or we'll never move forward at all. The most simple system is almost always invariably the best, and if we adjusted the definition of a planet to include Pluto but exclude other objects of that type then all we've done is overcomplicate the system in the method of Ptolemy, adding epicycles and deferents until the geocentric model can fit that which is observed. If Copernicus's heliocentric model had never been accepted for feelings of some sort of whimsical nostalgia then where would astronomy be today?

If the IAU feels that Pluto should not be qualified as a planet, the from the point of view of someone who not only encourages but rejoices in the progression of scientific thought, I think their reasons are perfectly acceptable.