The “cleared its orbit” requirement is too arbitrary and non-scientific. We should’ve gone the other direction and classified more objects as planets.
Feels like we can agree to disagree on that one but I hope we can all agree that Neil deGrasse Tyson is fucking annoying.
While we can disagree on the latter portion, the first sentence is simply fact. The IAU does not provide any guidelines based on quantifiable data for this requirement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhoodI like him.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
well yeah it’s quite readily admitted to be non-scientific, scientists generally just use “celestial object” afaik.
Then we’d have several hundred to a few thousand planets and need a new term for the larger celestial objects anyway. Seems silly. Planet is already arbitrary.
Unironically this
I’m glad Neil DeGrasse Tyson is so universally reviled by people who actually care about science…
Honestly asking one’s opinion on him is enough to tell who is interested by science and who “totally loves science bro”
It’s so refreshing to hear this. Even when I was less educated, his smugness annoyed me SO MUCH that it made me feel like “If actual cosmologists are like this, I couldn’t stand them anyway.” It made science and the community feel very unattractive, since his marketing puts him all over the place where the tag “science” appears.
He talks like a fedora-sporting moderator from a ~2006 atheist-reason-rational-skeptics-or-else forum. As if he personally has already unlocked all the secrets of the universe and if your sci-fi movie isn’t perfectly adhering to known science you’re an absolute buffoon.
Sadly Bill Nye seems kinda similar, and I even got to meet him in person. He was rather irked that people wanted to get pictures and autographs with him long before the symposium even started. (Despite being lauded as a hero by countless inquisitive children and all)
TL;DR: Despite the unrelenting tide of anti-intellect, I’m glad there’s a lot of serious scientists who aren’t just in it to lord it over everybody else.
The people who “Fucking love science” are just another flavor of anti Intellectual
Probably the saddest kind. The ones in denial