The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet by Neil deGrasse Tyson Page B

an authoritative source. So Novacek called Jeremiah P. Ostriker, author of more than 200 scientific papers on astrophysics, winner of the U.S. National Medal of Science, provost of Princeton University and former chair of Princeton’s renowned department of astrophysical sciences (where I was, at the time, an adjunct professor), and a recently appointed trustee of the museum itself. What did Ostriker say to Novacek? “Whatever Neil did is okay by me.”
    I didn’t learn of this exchange until years later, when Ostriker casually recounted it as part of another conversation. He had treated the media attention like a non-event, the same way Jane Luu had done in the panel debate. To them, the hoopla wasn’t about a scientific question. The organization of the solar system, how the solar system came to be the way it is—those are genuine scientific questions. But the labels you give things—no. You’re having an argument over something you generate rather than what is fundamental to the universe. While you’re sitting around debating, Pluto and the rest of the universe happily keep doing whatever it is they do, without regard to our urges to classify.
    Meanwhile, just weeks after Kenneth Chang’s article appeared in the New York Times , the same paper published a second article, this one the brainchild of Mark Sykes, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory in Tucson and, at the time, chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. Well aware of the storm brewing at the Rose Center, Sykes sent an e-mail warning me that the division’s executive committee might be drafting a statement rebuking our treatment of Pluto. He also alerted the Times that he would be in New York on business and intended to meet with me to discuss the matter—and would the Times like to send over a reporter to listen to the conversation? They, of course, agreed.
    Sykes came. So did Kenneth Chang, serving as witness and juror, as well as a Times photographer. We chatted around my office’s brass coffee table, retrofitted from a 4-foot, circular, contemporary engraving that had been on display among the history of science exhibits of the old Hayden Planetarium. It portrays the long-defunct geocentric model of the universe, complete with Earth in the center and planetary epicycles looping around it. Not to miss a single word, Chang recorded the entire conversation on tape.
    The resulting article appeared with the headline: “Icy Pluto’s Fall From the Planetary Ranks: A Conversation,” accompanied by a short piece about the prospects for a mission to Pluto. There’s also a photo of Sykes attempting to choke me alongside the giant sphere, with the gas giants hanging in the background. The caption reads, “Dr. Mark Sykes, left, challenges Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson to explain the treatment of Pluto in the planet display at the Hayden Planetarium.”

    Figure 4.8. Mark Sykes (left) and the author in adversarial, but playful embrace on the Scales of the Universe walkway of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. This photo appeared in the New York Times , accompanying the transcript of our minidebate. Sykes, a planetary scientist and, at the time, chair of the Planetary Sciences Division of the American Astronomical Society, threatened to have his division draft a public statement rebuking the treatment of Pluto in our exhibits. I threatened to toss him over my left shoulder into the Hall of the Universe below.
    The published conversation reads like a raw transcription, and as we see from this excerpt, Sykes’s views on the matter are unyielding and unambiguous: 24
     
    DR. SYKES The consensus exists. Unanimity may not, but I think consensus does, and the consensus is that people feel Pluto should not—it’s fine to call it a Kuiper Belt object—but we should not remove its designation as a planet. People are thinking not families, not groups, not cousins. They’re thinking