Kaira was telling me what she would say on HER blog if she had a blog. Here's Kaira, age 6, in her own very adament words reporting from PrairieFrog Academy with her reactions to the recent announcement by the Planet Definition Committee.
"The Scientists are wrong. My astronomy book says it is a planet, and to me everything that goes around the sun is a planet. The moon isn't a planet because it goes around the Earth. Pluto just goes around the sun. It is a planet. The scientists are silly. I disagree with them. I disagree with them on lots of things anyway."
(See my previous post for the links to articles on Pluto being nixed from the list of planets)
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Thursday, August 24, 2006 - Untitled Comment
When Isaac Newton discovered the Law of Gravity in 1686, the best part about it was that he was able for the first time to explain the "perturbations" in the orbits of the planets -- little jiggles that indicate that the planets speed up and slow down when they passing big planets like Jupiter and Saturn. The perturbations were a bad problem for 17th century science. This also turned out to be excellent proof for the Sun-centered theory, which became widely accepted after Newton's theory.
Anyway, after Uranus was discovered 100 years later, it helped explain some other mysterious perturbations that were seen in the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. Years later, in 1846, some extra measured perturbations indicated the presence of another planet beyond Uranus. Two separate scientists, one in England and the other in France, each predicted where exactly in the sky this other planet should be, based on the gravity that created these extra perturbations. When people pointed their telescopes at that spot, they discovered the planet Neptune. This was a huge triumph for classical physics, since Neptune was "discovered" on paper before it was seen through a telescope.
After that time, science starting getting "too big for its britches." People started believing that just about anything could be done through science. Only 13 years after Neptune was discovered, Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution. People started believing more in science than in God.
Years later, in the 1890s, there was a man named Perceival Lowell who taught people that there were really Martians living on the planet Mars. A lot of people believed him. We now know he was wrong, and that there are no weird, yucky aliens living on Mars. But Mr. Lowell became very rich and famous and started the Lowell Observatory.
In the 1920s, a lot of scientists believed there were more perturbations in the planets's orbits, and predicted that there was another big "gas giant" planet -- "Planet X" -- beyond Neptune. In 1930, a young man named Clyde Tombaugh, who worked at the Lowell Observatory, studied photographs of the stars and discovered one that moved, just about where Planet X was predicted to be. So the announcement went out that the new planet was discovered, and they called it Pluto. And since the Lowell Observatory was a big-name astronomy place, everyone believed it.
But pretty soon, it was discovered that there were some problems with Pluto. First, they found out that the new planet had a very weird orbit that went high above the other planets and crossed inside the orbit of Neptune. Then they took careful measurements and saw still more perturbations that weren't coming from Pluto. So they thought there was a 10th planet even further beyond. It was soon learned that Pluto was much too small to be a gas giant, and they learned that it was smaller than the Earth.
Many years later, when we started sending robot spaceships into space, soon scientists learned that there were many other large iceballs out in space near Pluto. They found out that Pluto was much smaller than Earth's Moon. They learned from their spaceships that there was a mistake when the perturbations were measured back in 1930. There was no longer a reason to believe that there was a big 10th planet in our solar system. The discovery of Pluto was just a coincidence!
The worst part was, now the scientists were discovering iceballs that were larger than Pluto! So the scientists had to decide -- should they also call all these new "planets" or should they stop calling Pluto a planet?
Just today this very day, the scientists all got together and decided to admit that they made a mistake. New scientific work has shown that Pluto never really was a planet, but instead was a just large iceball in a place called "The Kuiper Belt," filled with maybe thousands of similar iceballs, some larger than Pluto and others small enough to become comets.
Anyway, scientists always say that science fixes it's mistakes when they learn new things. But still, it's very rare for scientists to admit when they make a mistake. And a lot of scientists are not happy since they agree with you, and they are also used to having Pluto as one of the planets. But everyone should be happy when scientists admit when they make a mistake, especially people who believe that Jesus made the universe as we read about in the Bible. Because if scientists make mistakes too, then they are just regular people like us, who need the grace of Jesus to be saved.
Let me know if you have any questions! -jayfromcleveland