Still More Books

I read them, so you have to read about them. Unless you've already clicked off this blog, in which case, I guess you don't have to read about them.

Down the Long Night, William F. Nolan - I'm not familiar with Nolan's work, but this is a compilation of short stories by him, which have either never been published, or were only previously published in magazines you can't find anymore. They're in the suspense/thriller genre, usually involving detectives, but rarely involving a mystery. Some of them are odder than others. One is essentially a list of the evidence collected from the home of a suspected serial killer, detailing poems he wrote, pictures he kept, letters he received from former cellmates, mementos from his victims, and finally, a brief police conversation with his mother, who came to visit, and seeing blood on his hands, shot him dead. Yikes.

Others are, thankfully, a bit on the lighter side. One story is set on Mars, and involves Robot Sherlock Holmes, Robot Watson, and Private Eye Sam Space (Human) trying to deal with the apparent return of the Hound of the Baskervilles, as the Baskervilles had moved their estate to Mars some time previously. The funniest part is when Watson approaches Space, asking him to please rent Sherlock so Holmes can solve this crime, and Space retorts that the last time he saw Robot Holmes, the crazy bot claimed Space was Moriarty and tried tos hoot him with a horse pistol. Well, I thought it was funny.

Is Pluto A Planet?, David A. Weintraub - If I remember correctly, Pluto did get demoted out of the ranks of the planets a year or so ago, but I think this book was written slightly before that. At any rate, I would say Weintraub is less concerned with whether Pluto, specifically is a planet, than what, exactly defines a planet. Which makes some sense. How can you categorize an object if you don't have a sound grasp of the criteria that would define the category you are trying to assign the object?

So the book instead starts at the earliest human records we have, and moves forward from there, detailing the different definitions of planet (or wandering star, or whatever), and which celestial objects (and how many of them) were classified as such at any given time. The book spends some time on Aristotle, and the struggle by believers in geocentrism to explain why, if everything is revolving around the Earth, they can't predict the movements properly. Then there's some discussion of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, their findings that support helicentrism, and the problems they faced, how Newton figuring out the law of gravity provided a mathematical, verifiable basis for Kepler's laws of motion, and so on.

Turns out there have been several "ninth planets", as different objects are called planets, then later have that status revoked. The Sun and Moon stopped being planets, the Earth became one, once astronomers realized comets were just smudges in the atomsphere, but were also moving around the sun, they decalred them to not be planets, which tells you something a planet isn't, but not what a planet is. At one point, there were 14 planets, until they decided that Ceres and it's fellows in the asteroid belt weren't large enough.

I don't feel like Weintraub directly supports a position one way or the other. He points out that the best criteria they have* aren't really enough, since you have to contend with planets that may have been wrenched from their stars and are free floating, and all sorts of other oddities. However, he points out there aren't really any criteria you can add to help Pluto qualify, that won't allow a lot of other objects in as well. Pluto exists in a sort of specific orbital belt that it shares with several other objects they've discovered in the last dozen years or so, generally called Plutinos**. So it's isn't so different from the asteroids, or the other Kuiper Belt objects, except it's a little larger. But there are plenty of moons larger than Pluto, so a specific diameter isn't really much of a criteria.

There are some interesting tidbits in this book, such as the fact that Galileo observed Neptune through his telescope over 200 years before it was officially discovered***, he just didn't realize it. That there was for a few decades in the late 1800s believed to be a planet inside Mercury's orbit, that would account for Mercury not orbiting the Sun as their mathematics predicted. So there was a planet whose gravity that could affect Mercury's orbit, but no other planet showed any effect? Turns out it was a limit of Newton's law of gravity that caused the seeming error, and Einstein's theory of relativity cleared things up. That Pluto's discovery was a serious fluke (and a testament to Clyde Tombaugh's diligence), because Percival Lowell couldn't see past his own biases to realize his math was flawed, and so they should never have undergone the search for Planet X, and thus, Tombaugh should never have been hired. Strange how things work out.

* 1) Must be too small for any sort of stellar fusion, excluding stars and brown dwarfs. 2) Must be large enough to be spherical, excluding the tiny, oddly shaped asteroids. 3) Must have its primary orbit around a star, excluding satellites.

** It turns out the Plutinos orbit at just the right speed so that they never cross Neptune's orbit near it. They're always separated by about half an orbit, which keeps them from being tossed out of the solar system by Neptune's gravity.

*** I guess he kept detailed sketches of the night sky, and those had survived over the two centuries, so when Neptune was found, they were able to go back and check, and there it was. Came in handy for estimating Neptune's orbit for future positions.