Pluto's a Dwarf, Get Over It: Star Physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is America’s poet laureate of astrophysics. To some, he’s also its public enemy no. 1.

In 2000, as the new director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, he didn’t include Pluto among the planets in an exhibit about the Solar System. It wasn’t an accident: that icy bizarre outerlying celestial body we all thought we knew (we didn’t) had it coming. But just as NASA’s probe was starting to make its way to Pluto, his little decision to fire the planet landed him in a universe of pain, and left everyone from third graders to three-degree researchers confused.

The result was The Pluto Files, a book-turned-documentary that aired this week on NOVA (watch it online here). Despite all the hype however, the whole thing is a mix-up, see, and everyone really just needs to cool their jets. It’s not about an ice planet, and it’s not about a cartoon dog either. It’s about how the public gets interested in science, an interest that doesn’t just come from viral videos about black holes (although those can’t hurt). It’s an interest that could determine the outcome of elections, our national ambitions, the earth’s well-being, and, well, the survival of our species in the face of an asteroid that’s hurtling towards the Earth right now. No, really.

Which is exactly the reason why he’s excited to be done with all this Pluto business. It’s about time he get on to more important things, like doing his NOVA scienceNOW show, advocating for smarter science education, and building more interest in space and the earth. Well, after he kindly answers some of our questions.

Motherboard: So you have called Pluto a dwarf. How do you really feel about it?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Actually, I wasn’t the one who called it a dwarf. That was the decision, by vote, of the international community of astrophysicists, reclassifying Pluto as a planet to a dwarf planet. In fact, we didn’t call it anything; we just grouped it with other icy bodies in the outer solar system. That’s all we did, but a year later, when the New York Times discovered that we did it, and laid down the page one headline: “Pluto Not a Planet: Only in New York.” And it was that headline that thrust me into the middle of the public’s awareness of what was going on in the outer solar system, and our understanding of the outer solar system.

I’m okay with the term ‘dwarf planet,’ but I was never as opinionated as I was made out to be. It’s as though for a while there I was simply a public enemy, because I was an easy target. People assumed that we had some new exhibit here that keeps Pluto out of the solar system and says there are only eight parents now. And so I felt like giving them what they wanted and saying, “Yeah, Pluto wasn’t big enough to make it in New York.” They were almost taunting me to reply in that way. But its quite simple: we just grouped objects with similar properties in the solar system together and talked about them as families of objects, as opposed to the enumeration of countable spheres.

So what were the most extreme examples of backlash against this new classification?
We’re talking about seven, eight, nine-year-old children saying, ‘what do you have against Pluto? You don’t like it just because it’s small? Well that’s discrimination, and discrimination is wrong.’ People went on, and on, and on. I created this file that was busting out of my desk, and I ultimately said I have to do something about this correspondence, about this life experience, especially since so much of my life was given to it when I really wanted to be doing other things. So out came this book, The Pluto Files, on which the documentary is based.

So why did you let it take up so much of your time?
That’s an excellent question. I have a certain public… part of my duty is as a servant of public interest in the universe. So if the public is interested, I can’t just say ‘don’t be interested in that.’ You know, I need to celebrate that fact, or guide it in a way that’s illuminating for all involved. So, I just would have preferred it been that level of science interest in other subjects, not just what we happened to be calling Pluto. Because new objects were discovered in the outer solar system. So I tried to make lemonade out of lemons, and used it as a reason, as did many science teachers out there, used it as an excuse to revisit all that is going on, and that has been discovered in the solar system. So it became a teaching moment.

But now “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” doesn’t work anymore. I hope you’ve got a new mnemonic for remembering the planets.
I talk about that in the book, and I give some examples of mnemonics, before and after. However, what I say is, memorizing planets in order from the sun is not what anybody should be doing. It’s because we all memorized them in elementary school that, when one gets taken away, we cry foul. Had that not been the way the solar system was taught, I don’t think people would have been as insulted by this information as they were, because they’re left with the impression that the memorized sequence of planets from the sun was something scientific to know. But its not.

Something scientific to know is that if they are all large and gaseous; we call them the gas giants. They all have rings, they all have moon systems, they all rotate fast, that’s kind of interesting to know. So you’re learning physical things about their behavior, not memorizing them in sequence from the sun.

If I had my way, people would learn the solar system in an entirely different way. Had that been the case, nobody would have been crying over the reclassification of Pluto. Which many called a demotion, but if you drive a compact car, its still a car. Somehow people felt that a dwarf planet was not a planet.

I want to get back to the literacy question, but this brings up the issue of the science community and the astronomy community, what was their reaction? It sounds like serious controversy still remains, that some scientists were very upset about the reclassification, and that a lot of that anger might have been directed at you.
Well there were two episodes, there was what we did ten years ago, when we opened this new facility – this year’s now our tenth anniversary – and that’s what landed the page one story in the Times. There was reaction to that, with everybody choosing sides. The people who were discovering objects in the outer solar system were in support of what we had done. The people whose research objectives focused on Pluto as a material object in the solar system landed on the other side of the camp. I was sort of cast into the middle of that.

But it’s not just me – I was here with a committee of people. I was head of the committee, but I didn’t make this decision alone. As head of the committee we discussed it, we unanimously agreed on the steps that we took. So it was six years later that an official vote was taken, and then people continued to choose sides thereafter. That vote came about for many reasons, but I think it got forced because Mike Brown, who’s an astronomer at Caltech, discovered an object out there bigger than Pluto. So what are you going to call that? Is that a planet? If it’s not a planet, then you’re going to have to take Pluto down with it. If it is a planet, then that’s a planet, Pluto stays a planet, and so are the half-dozen other objects that are around in the solar system that previously didn’t have that distinction.

The data was forcing a vote, forcing a reassessment of what’s going on out there. A vote was taken, and now the new nomenclature is that Pluto is a “dwarf planet.” And Sirius, a round asteroid, the only round asteroid, is elevated to dwarf planet status, in this new definition. So Pluto is not the only object of consequence for this decision.

It seems like it’s not just the issue of what Pluto is. We’ve got a lot of things out there that we should be talking about, and a lot of those have the word planet in them. But if a third-grader asked you what a planet is, what would you say?
I would answer a different question. I would say there are different kinds of objects that orbit the sun. Some are small and rocky – that’s these, like Earth and Mars. Some are big and gaseous; they’re these. Some are icy and have really elongated orbits, we call those comets. Some are moon-like.

So I would approach the information differently. Now, there are plenty of people who are in the Pluto-is-not-a-planet camp that will simply tell you that there are eight planets now. There is no footage of me ever uttering those words, because I’m not counting planets, before or after Pluto. That’s not important, how many planets there are – it’s just not.

But how did you get introduced to the planets?
Like everyone else. The textbook did it, the exhibits did it, each planet got its own panel, listing how big it is, what it’s made of, how far from the sun, how fast it moves, turn the page, then it’s the next planet! Then you learn how long is a day, and that sort of thing. So you would think, by the end of that exercise, that the solar system was the sun, and the object to memorize was the sequence, rather than the asteroids and comets and moons. In some cases, the moons are more interesting than the host planets themselves.

But what hooked you? How did you get so excited about space?
I was nine years old, and my parents took me and my brother and sister to our local planetarium, which was the Hayden planetarium. From then on I was star-struck, if you will. I kind of think that the universe chose me – I had nothing to do with it. Sitting there under the dome, the lights dimmed, the stars coming out. Bada bing, I was hooked. It was done. I knew exactly what I’d be like when I grew up. But it took a couple of years to realize that that could be a profession, rather than just something cool. I was only nine. So by age eleven, if you started asking me what do you want to be when you grow up, that annoying question that adults always ask kids, I had an answer for you. It was, I want to be an astrophysicist.

Not an astronaut?
Never. Astronauts were working on the earth, and occasionally going to the moon. The entire universe is what interested me. I want to go someplace and do something really interesting.

How do you describe your role in the universe now, as a human being, as an educator, as a scientist?
Well, I think the greatest contribution I can make would be to sensitize people to the importance of being simply scientifically literate. In a free democratic society, your own capacity to think is fundamental to the success of the government that you elected to serve you. And part of that enlightenment will require science literacy, as well as whatever else it takes to know who to vote for in an election, for example. Or however you decide policy decisions. So if I could do that, I’d feel like that was a good day. Raise science literacy a few notches.

How has science literacy changed in the past decade?
Early on, and even today, most people who think of science literacy think of like, “do you know what the DNA molecule is? Do you know what causes the seasons?” and it becomes an exercise in recitation. I have a different take on science literacy. While knowledge matters, something matters more, and that is how your brain is wired for thought. And it comes down to: what’s your next thought? If I say to you, I have these two crystals. If you rub them together, it will cure your ailments. So what is your next thought? Is it, “Oh wow, great, how much are they? I want to buy some!” Is that your next thought? Or is your next thought, “How do they work? What kinds of ailments do they work on? What’s the mechanism?”

Starting to ask questions – that’s the wiring of the scientifically inquiring mind. If you start asking the right questions, any claims that are based on spurious assertions will collapse under the weight of the investigation.

Spurious assertions and inquisitive minds…that sounds like a very uphill battle, especially now.
It’s always uphill. I don’t mind climbing uphill. You see farther when you climb uphill. Anyone who goes to the top of Mount Everest is in search of going uphill. That’s what challenges are all about. I don’t fear the uphill dimension of this.

We love to spread articles on the internet, and as a recent study pointed out, especially articles about science. People seem to really love science. But what do you think is the content of that love? Is it more of a flirtation, a one-night-stand, or a romance?
It is very selective. I don’t mind that its selective, but we have to recognize that fact. I can give two classic examples. One is my own field; there is not equal interest in all things that people are doing in my field. There is much greater interest in the big bang, black holes, and the search for life than there is for the study of fusion in the center of stars, or the formation of galaxies. I know this, and I’m okay with that. So the fact that I see the variation within my own field tells me that this must also exist from field to field. Not all fields are going to be equally as interesting to all people. I don’t have a problem with that as long as there’s some sensitivity to the value of science literacy.

What role does science-fiction play in fostering science literacy? Did it have any impact on your own fascination?
The most scientifically literate people I know in the general public are avid science fiction readers. It’s hardly played any role in my life. My enthusiasm derived from the universe itself. I love a good sci-fi film, but so do most people.

I heard about your qualms with the end of Titanic, and how you asked James Cameron to change it. But do you have any favorite sci-fi films?
Contact, 2001, Deep Impact. They had science advisers and got the science right.

There’s been a lot of popular excitement in the past few years related to astrophysics. But what are people missing out on? I imagine that because of all the buzz over some sensational things like black holes, there are some really good stories out there that the public hasn’t heard about…
There are stories that you are not thinking about, because they are not affecting you, and they’re not interesting. Then there are the stories that you’re not thinking about, but they do affect you, and they’re interesting because they affect you. You just haven’t heard about them yet. I see it as my duty to bring those kinds of stories to everyone’s attention. And then there are the stories that are just simply tasty no matter what. And those are kind of interesting.

What story in the past couple of years has been the most interesting to you, one that deserve more attention than it’s received?
I think the fact that the chemical elements in the human body are traceable to stars, and began their lives five billion years ago is an extraordinary fact that is unheralded. It was discovered by a team of people working over a decade, which doesn’t lend itself to the lone researcher stereotype, burning the midnight oil.

You’ve kind of made that notion famous with that autotuned space jam We’re All Connected.
Yeah, they used my phrase for that, to title it. And Bill Nye, of course, you can’t ever forget Bill Nye!

What’s your relationship like with the Science Guy, by the way?
Yeah, we’re very good friends, actually. I’ll be seeing him in two days, in London.

What are you guys doing?
We’re giving Stephen Hawking an award. Bill Nye and I serve on the board of the Planetary Society, and the award is the Cosmos Award, given for the popularization of science. Stephen Hawking, given the books he’s written, and he’s also coauthored children’s books with his daughter, we felt that the time has come to give him the recognition along with everything else he’s been recognized for.

Nye, Hawking, Tyson—that sounds like an exciting convention. Do you and Steve hang out much?
This will be my first time meeting him. I saw him once at a conference, a long time ago, in Texas, but this will be my first time actually meeting him.

I remember Hawking once addressing that terribly daunting, taunting question about the universe by saying something like, “Asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what’s north of the north pole.” I loved that but I was also a bit bothered by it, because it seemed to imply the question was somehow absurd. Maybe I’m wrong. How do you like to think about this question?

If time, as we have defined it, is simply a coordinate system to help us navigate the fabric of our universe then time simply begins at the Big Bang, precluding meaningful conversation about what happened before. This is the thrust of Hawking’s comment. But if, instead, you think of time as not having a beginning, or rather, time existing outside of our universe, then the question of what happened before the Big Bang is entirely sensible. And in today’s thinking, may relate to the form, structure, behavior of the proposed multiverse.

Carl Sagan obviously was a big influence on you.

Yeah, from several encounters I had with him, but not for any of the typical reasons that he would be influential on others. I was fully formed long before I ever met him, fully formed in my interest in the universe. So that’s not something I can credit him for awakening within me. But he did give me certain outlooks on what it means to be a scientist that I carry with me to this day.

What is that outlook? What was his impact?

In high school, my application to college, in that particular case Cornell, was flagged by the admissions office, and forwarded to Carl Sagan, after which he sent me a personal letter inviting me to come tour the school. And he didn’t know me from anybody. And I went up there, he met me outside his office, and we went in and chatted about the universe, and he signed a book over to me, which I still have.

So upstate New York in April – it’s pretty cold. It’s beginning to snow, and I’m going to the bus station, and he writes his home phone number on a piece of paper, that says if the bus doesn’t get through, call me, and you can spend the night at my place, and go back tomorrow. So this is the level of generosity and consideration that I didn’t think was possible in someone of his visibility. And that became a very strong directive within me – that I would I would give attention to students as a priority over attention I would give to anything else.

He really transformed the way people see science, and think about their place in the universe.
That’s right. Precisely.

But what impact did that popularization have on the field, what kind of tensions arose between hardcore “high astrophysics” and the popular kind. How has that tension shift?
You are correct to recognize that as a source of tension in Carl Sagan’s day. But that tension, once people saw that public support for the study of the universe improved, not only through Congressional allocations of money, but through general enthusiasm that the public had, and those two are correlated, of course. Whatever blood existed on the tracks back then, right now, I can do what he did back then, and do it in a way that is celebrated rather than feared by colleagues.

I say it has come a long way for astrophysics, but I don’t see the same progress in other fields, not in geology, not even in physics. I see a level of resistance given to those who choose this kind of activity. And I think it is in no small measure a product of the fact that Carl Sagan himself was an astronomer. So it’s now part of our culture, our astrophysics culture, the culture of those who study the universe, whereas other professions don’t have it.

Do you think they will?
Slowly. They need someone who makes a difference who has their expertise, who can benchmark that, and they don’t have that right now.

Who is your audience then? Do you think it ever includes other scientists?
My target audience are adults who knew enough about science to know that it’s occasionally cool, but might have been a little scared by it, but don’t want to feel bad for not knowing something about it. And if kids can watch it as well, then that’s fine too, but I’m not targeting kids.

My dad often sings the praises of Leonard Bernstein and his Young People’s Concerts, which were trying to engage kids in the joys of classical music. There’s sort of a resonance there with what you’re doing. Do you know those?
Yes, yes I do. But in that case he actually, that was his active energy to do that. I don’t have that energy. To the extent that I can serve the young person’s marketplace of cosmic curiosity, that’s fine, but I’m not seeking it out. My goal is the voting adults out there. They far outnumber kids. They run the world. They allocate resources and money. They’re the ones who wage war. They’re the ones who wage peace. Those have always been sort of my target. And like I said, if kids can follow it and stay with it, then that’s fine too.

Speaking of allocating resources, what do you make of the new direction for space exploration?
Well, there is no direction. We’re not going anywhere. The silver lining there is the initiative to stimulate the commercial participation in low-earth orbit. That should have been done decades ago, as far as I’m concerned. Earth orbit is no longer the space frontier, and so NASA really has very little to advance there. Given the goal of NASA, when it was founded, was to move the frontier out into space. If you’re not doing that, then you’re not fulfilling your prime directive.

Where did we go wrong?
The public, in my judgment, has never understood the actual value of NASA in what we are as a nation. It’s this ignorance that leads people to say, “why are you spending money up there when we should be spending money down here?” It’s almost mantra. The assumption is that if the money is up there it can’t possibly influence who and what you are and what you’re doing down here. Holding aside the fact that if you only ever look down you’ll miss the asteroid that’s on its way, holding aside that our original understanding of the greenhouse effect was on the planet Venus. Holding aside the fact that our understanding of local phenomenon affecting global climate came about from the study of the asteroid effect that took out the dinosaurs.

Holding aside all that, the fact is, when NASA has ambitious goals, the country feels that it can dream about the future. No other agency has that capacity, that power, that force – to operate on the educational pipeline to stimulate people to want to be scientists and engineers and be a part of that epic journey. Without it, those same smart people become investment bankers, or lawyers, or something where a smart person can still do very well, but they’re not advancing what we are in this world, technologically or intellectually.

You don’t think NASA can capture imaginations going forward?
Not the way it’s currently configured. We need an electorate that requires that of NASA, and then elected officials that recognize that fact.

Do you have any reason to be optimistic about the commercialization of space?
I’m very optimistic. I think it should have happened decades ago.

But with further space exploration? With possible trips to Mars?
I see that nowhere in the foreseeable future. That won’t happen until some other country decides to do it and we’re embarrassed by the fact that we’re still sitting on our buns talking about it. It would require a flame lit under our rears such as what happened in 1957 with Sputnik.

It reminds me a little of the aborted super-conducting super-collider.
Exactly, exactly. Consider when that came up. That was in the late ’80’s, and they finally cut the budget in the early nineties. At that time, peace broke out, and so the military incentive to keep physicists employed was viewed as no longer needed. And so here’s this huge project, and we would have led the field in this subject, and now we just stand on the shores looking across the pond to Switzerland as Europe leads the way.

At the same time, people might say that this shouldn’t be an issue of national superiority or pride. The Large Hadron Collider will provide results for the entire world. What’s the big deal about having it in our country?
If you think about this from the point of view of a pure scientist, there’s no difference. If we don’t discover it, someone else will, and that’s great. Science advances. The difference is that if we don’t lead, then all of the technologies that had to be innovated to create that machine are innovated by somebody else. All the spin-off applications of those technologies, all the unique machinery that had to be built and designed to construct it – those are all now the plans and blueprints of foreign countries, applied in foreign soil. And so if we ever wanted to do that today, we’d have to buy their machines to do it. That’s the beginning of the end. When you have to depend on everybody else to get done what you want to get done, you’re no longer a fighter. You’re a follower. And that has consequences to the strength and health of your economy.

Well, on the bright side, some people are relieved the thing isn’t here, concerned that the Large Hadron Collider’s would open up an earth-swallowing black hole. How do you account for that kind of fear-mongering? There are a lot of doomsday scenarios floating around right now.
Ever decade people want to believe that the world is going to end. Its been going on since Jesus walked the earth. It’s not a new human emotion – its common, its old, its quite storied, actually. In the context of people are always expecting the world to end, its not surprising that they will latch onto whatever is the next machine, the next discovery, the next thing they don’t fully understand, and use that as the catalyst for suggesting that the world would come to an end, for real, this time, as opposed to last time.

The last big end of the world scenario was the Y2K scare, right, “Oh the world’s going to end in the year 2000.” No, it didn’t, and I knew it wouldn’t. Its just people being scared for no reason, and its that kind of fear that would dissolve in a more scientifically literate public. They would know how to understand threats to health, security, and well-being. They would know, if they didn’t understand something, to learn about it even more, so they could make an informed decision.

What do we really have to be afraid of right now?
Ourselves. In America, we to have to be afraid of losing our significance on the world stage, irrelevance. As a world, we should keep track of asteroids that could render us all extinct. There’d be no greater laughing stock in the galaxy but earthlings, for others to learn that we had the power to deflect an asteroid, because we have an active space program, but didn’t have the foresight to do it. It’d be embarrassing for an intelligent species to go extinct for that reason. It’d be grounds to judge that in fact the species wasn’t intelligent at all.

What are the chances that this asteroid, this Apophis [named by the way, after an evil demon in Egyptian mythology] will destroy …
With better data, the chances have improved for our survival. So now its several in a million, and that’s a better chance then what it had been before which was one in 45,000.

What kind of an impact would that have on the planet, if it were to hit?
It would likely hit the Pacific Ocean and create a tsunami that would wipe clean the entire west coast of the United States. You can have two kinds of people: you can have people who run away from that problem and escape the coast to safety, or you have people who say how can I deflect that? That’s the difference between people who don’t value scientific theory and people who do.

I’d like to think of myself as in the latter camp. Speaking of which, how does one get a lifetime pass to the Hayden Planetarium?
[Hearty laugh] I don’t think we have lifetime passes. We want you to keep come back and paying.

Oh darn it. It was there that I learned and got excited about the universe, by the way.
Well, there you go—another way we’re connected.