Example of the conventionality of scientific classifications: We can’t even agree on what counts as a planet.

According to an editorial in today’s NY Times, Michael Brown, a Caltech astronomer, declined to call the object he found last year a planet and suggested that neither is Pluto. Now he’s found something bigger than Pluto and suggests that we call it and Pluto planets. According to The Times: “There was still no good scientific rationale for the judgment, he admitted, but this was a case where habit — 75 years of calling Pluto a planet—should trump any scientific definition.”

I don’t care except that I like that something we take as so iconic, so definitional as the solar system itself should turn out to be as much a matter of convention as whether we count pool as a game or as a sport. [Thanks to our daughter Leah for the link.] [Technorati tags: taxonomy astronomy]

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