July 27, 2006--ReBlog II

Driving east today across upper Missouri, first past the town of Laclede where General Pershing spent his boyhood, then to Marceline where Walt Disney grew up, and then finally, along the same road, on to Hannibal, Mark Twain’s hometown, we wondered what in that less-than-one–hundred-miles of flat, seemingly textureless landscape so fired their imaginations. And decided it was just that—the flatness and lack of apparent texture were just the ingredients needed to spark them to imagine the worlds that they then moved to inhabit.

The ReBlog for today is “Xena the Warrior Planet”:

I don’t know about you but it has been an ongoing comfort to me to “know” that there are nine, just nine planets out there in our solar system—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Mercury. You see, I even know their names and their “order.” It was also reassuring to know that just Earth and Jupiter had moons and Saturn that amazing ring. In a universe that might be 15 billion years old, with cosmic distances of 10 to the 18th power light years (with one of those years being the distance light travels in a year at 186,000 miles a second), in other words, in a cosmos of such incomprehensible distances, how cozy and secure it has felt to know the manageable reach and structure of our own stellar neighborhood.

True, things were even cozier when some of us thought everything was created in just a few days and we were ensconsed at the center of the universe. We could even handle the emerging evidence that the universe was merely a few hundred thousand years old and the sun was at the center of the universe. Still secure; still reassuring. But then things began to fall apart, got more complicated and unnerving. I don’t know who to blame for this, but I am not at all happy about the changing view of the inner structure of the atom. I am not a hundred years old (just seems that way some days) and remember from high school physics the planetary view of the nucleus of the atom—with Protons and Neutrons at the very center, like a sun, surrounded by circling planetary Electrons.

That picture has been shattered just as the heliotropic view of the universe was. Now we have 12 fundamental particles to contend with—divided into two classes consisting of Leptons and Quarks. With the Leptons themselves consisting of six fundamental particles—Muons, Taus, Electron Neutrinos, Muon Neutrinos, Tau Neutrinos, and, thankfully, Electrons. Don’t ask about the Quarks (the name comes from Finnegan’s Wake—need I say more?) which contain Up and Down Quarks, Charm, Strange, and Top and Bottom Quarks. I’m not making this up and I’m not at all sure that this picture of things makes a strong case for Intelligent Design!

But back to the planets. No longer can we continue to believe that there are just nine planets. In fact, out beyond Pluto, a Cal Tech astronomer this past July discovered a 10th planet, larger than Pluto, that he named Xena. The name thankfully will not survive. If it is agreed that Xena is in fact a new planet, there is an international committee that has the power to come up with the official name—maybe they can auction off the right to name it on eBay, the way there was a recent auction to come up with the name for a newly discovered primate. Notwithstanding, whether we like it or not, Xena (or 2003 UB313—its current astronomical name) is out there looping around the sun.

Worse still, as reported in the NY Times, scientists are even debating that maybe we should junk the very concept of “planet” itself because there are so many other objects and so much space junk circling our sun that the notion of planetness may be obsolete! For example, there is the Oort Cloud, a halo of cometary scraps in deep space, the Kuiuper Belt, a ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune’s orbit, not to mention dozens of moons circling the planets.

What a mess. And do I ever feel obsolete.