

Pluto's demotion is a great opportunity for science - anateus
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/02/plutos-demotion-is-a-great-opportunity-for-science.ars

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JunkDNA
This article makes an excellent point. I can only speak from the US
perspective, but I think a lot of the reason the average non-scientist has
trouble with things like pluto suddenly not being a planet anymore is the way
science is taught to us as kids. For the most part, everything in science is
presented as a nice tidy package with little ambiguity as if we have it all
figured out. Sure, you get the occasional "scientists don't understand XYZ
yet" sort of explanation here or there, but for the most part everything is
presented as settled. This presentation persists from the time kids are very
young, all the way up through high school.

As a scientist, training yourself to be objective and questioning is one of
the hardest skills to learn. It takes until college before you start realizing
that science is messy and has all sorts of caveats, controversies, and
disagreements. Some of the issues are presented to students, but they are
often the ones which are blindingly obvious now (i.e. we have confirmed to
99.9% certainty that the sun does not revolve around the Earth). Rarely are
the really dicey controversies presented.

It takes even longer for you to realize that not only does all this ambiguity
exist, it's actually _the norm_. Once you start looking back at history, you
realize some of the biggest scientific discoveries were based on people
saying, "what if all my assumptions are totally wrong and there is a
completely different explanation for what I observe?". Or, some new kind of
technology enables you to view some previously hidden phenomenon and all your
assumptions are overturned immediately.

Unless you actually pursue a science-related career, you unlikely to ever
really understand any of this.

