Pluto is no longer a planet!

[merchimerch]

The high priests of science have spoken and are revoking the title of planet from poor little Pluto! This month we've had a world of possibilities in what kids will grow up learning in their science textbooks. I was rooting for the 12 planet system, but it was not to be.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5282440.stm

It makes me giggle when hard sciences illustrate the issues of representation and naming as well as how relative "truth" is.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

I'm a little baffled by this comment! The hard sciences are all about representation and naming, and that's because they don't have quite the same difficulties with "truth". So long as the objects your are dealing with are psychosocial, there's a plausible argument to be made that their names constrain them: society is all about enforcing the strong Whorfian hypothesis. But you really have to be a hardcore nominalist (or a hardcore conspiracy theorist, I guess) to believe that about physics... no?