Will the newly discovered planet like body called Xena displace Pluto....scientists gather to discuss this weighty matter.....Experts meet to decide Pluto fate
In fact they have no 'definition' of what a planet is..... New find further muddles definition of 'planet'
and Pluto was predicted to exist before it was found....sort of like what some folks call magick or presdigitation...
Brian Marsden
- Planet Killers (August 24, 2005).
- In 1930 the discovery of Pluto was regarded as a great achievement, for the
effort to find Pluto was spurred by theoretical predictions of a ninth planet. But Pluto is embarrassingly small, too small to be the predicted ninth planet. Now we are finding more and more Pluto-sized objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. We should take the hint, remove Pluto from the list of planets in the Solar System, and simply consider it as one of the largest planetoids in the Kuiper Belt.
It's time we admitted that accepting Pluto as the ninth planet was a big mistake. The announcement from the Lowell observatory in 1930 that a distant new planet had been found in accordance with the prediction by the observatory's founder was a brilliant exercise in public relations. Little heed was paid to critics who soon pointed out that the object was much smaller than Percival Lowell had claimed and that there was no way he could have made a meaningful prediction.
But Velikovsky predicted a tenth planet and it has been speculated about since the 1980's. Apollonius.Net - Speculations On "Planet X"
'Real' scientists like Lowell dismissed Velikovsky's theories about Venus and Pluto and its origins and about a tenth planet. Yet Lowell's own predictions were also flawed. Something Velikovsky sceptics overlook.
When Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision, he became the victim of most vehement and scurrilous persecution. To all of us plebes who tread streets of concrete, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference how the Solar System came to be in the shape it is in during our mayfly lives. One story is as good as another as long as it stops the kids from asking `How come?' when you want to put them to bed.
- Academic Freedom, Free Speech, and Harlow Shapley (February 23, 2005).
- Harlow Shapley was one of the leading astronomers of the early 20th century. In 1950, he was at the center of astronomy's most infamous episodes, when he and the astronomy community attempted to suppress the publication of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision. This episode is a nice illustration of the restrictiveness of academic freedom as compared to free speech, and it is a warning on how not to engage the public over bad science.
Velikovsky's contributions were cosmic catastrophism as well as the heresy that the universe was electro-magnetic, that plasma and electro-magnetic energy was as important, if not more important, than mass and gravity. It was a theory that open minded scientists took seriously, such as my physics prof at the University of Lethbridge. Velikovsky was given an honorary degree from the U of L. Which itself elicited more controversy.