20200908: Book 1, Post 1: How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown

In How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming the author, Mike Brown, details how as a scientist working at Caltech, he made the discovery that eventually lead to Pluto’s removal from the registry of planets. While this story is sufficiently interesting to revolve a memoir around, Brown fills the pages with wit, humor, and insight. I’ve only just started this book, but I’d like to share two captions that seem especially relevant.

In the first chapter, What is a Planet?, Brown describes his early childhood growing up in Huntsville, AL as the son of an Apollo program engineer. Everyone he knew was associated with NASA and the space program.

For a while as a child, I thought that when you grew up you became a rocket engineer if you were a boy and you married a rocket engineer if you were a girl; few other options in the world appeared to exist.

This exert shook me. While not 100% white, I know the aegis of white privilege. I’ve heard many black and brown testimonials discussing the importance of seeing someone successful that “looked like me”; I just didn’t listen. It’s sad that only after reading the words of a white man did the exact same kind of story emotionally resonate with me. I’m just starting to grasp that Perception and Hope are consequential factors. And this was only on page 11, I told you this book had a lot to offer.

The second passage is much more light-hearted and one that our professor probably finds especially true. Brown postulates that if he had been born a few years earlier, Jupiter and Saturn would be in different points in their orbit, and he might never have dedicated his life to planetary astronomy.

Perhaps my fate actually was determined by the positions of the planets at the moment of my birth.

I’ve never given much thought to any of the pseudo-sciences. Before I enrolled in USC, I worked in military intelligence and studied experimental astrophysics. For me, magic only existed on the quantum level. However, my thinking has evolved and now my worldview is big (and bold) enough to hold elements of astrology.

Theoretically, every object with mass exerts a gravitational pull on every other body with mass in the universe regardless of distance. The moon has a profound daily effect on the oceans called tides and it only takes one gamma ray to create cancer. Who can say -- with certainty – what influence an arrangement of heavenly bodies can have on our being?

Readability Statistics:
Flesch Reading Ease                     58.6
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level          9.4
Passive Sentences                         0.0%