Word: tysons
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...chair for the annual meeting, was joined by Mukesh D. Ambani, chairman and managing director of India-based Reliance Industries; Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman and chief executive officer of Nestlé in Switzerland; Sir Martin Sorrell, group chief executive of WPP; and London Business School Dean Laura D. Tyson...
Stewart has an inherently likable role, our bemused Virgil in the Inferno of media clichés. Colbert plays the devil himself: the millionaire pundit pretending to stand up for the little guy. He can even demagogue astronomy. When astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson told him Pluto should not be considered a planet, Colbert debated him thusly: "Isn't that just East Coast liberal intellectual ... did you go to an Ivy League school?" "Yes, I did." "... Ivy League-- educated people telling us what is or isn't a planet...
...Tyson's heretical planetarium exhibit was based on the theory that there must be lots of things out there the size of Pluto. Brown and Trujillo found some of them, and for the past year and a half, the pressure has been on to decide once and for all which are planets and which are not. 2003 UB313 just upped the ante. But it is like trying to define continent, says Brown. "Some geographers call Australia a continent," he says, "and some call it a very big island. There is no scientific definition." It is human nature to put things...
Most people don't worry much about such distinctions. With planets, however, it's different--as Tyson discovered. How do you resolve the problem he created? One idea would be to arbitrarily set the lower limit for a planet at about 2,000 km (1,250 miles) in diameter, which would let Pluto remain a planet and make 2003 UB313 one as well, but keep the rest of the riffraff out. "Pluto," says Alan Boss, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a member of the IAU working group, "has historically been considered a planet...
...Tyson, ever the iconoclast, thinks the word planet should be retired entirely, not just stripped from Pluto. "You tell me something's a planet," he says, "then I have to ask you 20 more questions to figure out what it actually is." As an educator as well as a scientist, though, he is thrilled that the question of planethood has been opened for freewheeling public discussion. "The point," says Tyson, who is working on a book about the Pluto debacle, "is that the solar system is a lot more interesting than just a list of nine planets." And thanks...