Here’s the story of how Pluto lost its planetary status and was demoted to an ice ball in the outer solar system. It’s also about my role in this at the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History.
Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.
Or maybe arguing with people you disagree with takes less effort than exploring why they think differently from you.
Instead of the White House, why not take our visiting space alien to ComicCon. We’d have legitimate concerns that nobody would notice an actual alien camouflaged among those pretending to be one. The upside? Our alien visitor phones home and instead reports – “They’re just like us!
All this leaves me wondering what it means to be aligned with a political party at all. Do they do your thinking for you? Do they define your attitudes toward issues that confront the country? If so, then you are a pawn of those in power. But in a representative republic, those in power should be a pawn of you.
Differences in opinion enrich the diversity of a nation, and ought to be cherished and respected in any free society, provided everyone remains free to disagree with one another and, most importantly, everyone remains open to rational arguments that could change your mind.
To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.
Imagine a world where nations find the search for life in the universe more interesting than the taking of life on Earth.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all.
With only rare exceptions, history shows that while strategy and bravery can win a battle, the frontiers of science and technology must be exploited to win a war.
When you explore the same basic information – the same data – from many different perspectives, especially when you compare one risk that you accept to another that you reject, the relevant details shine brightly while the irrelevant details melt away. These are the beginnings of an enlightened, scientifically literate perspective.
Believe it or not, Santa’s reindeer exemplify the problem. Unlike other deer species, both male and female reindeer grow antlers. So at a glance they all look the same. But zoologically all male reindeer lose their antlers in the late fall, well before Christmas.9 In spite of their names, only some of which are feminine,10 all Santa’s reindeer sport antlers. So they’re all female. Which means Rudolph has been misgendered.
Do whatever it takes to avoid fooling yourself into believing that something is true when it is false, or that something is false when it is true.
Even when arguing opinions, you may be surprised how potent a rational perspective can be. When illuminated by it, you fast discover that Earth supports not many tribes, but only one – the human tribe. That’s when many disagreements soften, while others simply evaporate, leaving you with nothing to argue about in the first place.
As the saying goes, we spend the first years of children’s lives teaching them to talk and walk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.
And yes, every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago.
One degree Celsius won’t feel like much on any given day to any given person, but totaled across the globe, it’s enough extra heat energy to power hundreds more hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and blizzards every year.
The Universe is blind to our sorrows and indifferent to our pains. Have a nice day!
It’s also good, apparently, for residents of Missouri.
We went to the moon, looking to discover it, and we looked back and we discovered Earth for the first time.
The Sun heats the ground, and the ground heats the air. Visible light hits Earth and heats it. Earth reradiates that same energy as infrared, and it’s the infrared that gets trapped by the greenhouse gases.