Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michael Brown - Is Pluto a planet?

Pluto: MAKE ME A PLANET AGAIN YOU ASSHOLES

Sedna: Me too! I'm almost as big.
Haumea: And me, I'm more than half the mass!
Ceres: Why not me? I used to be called a planet!
Eris: I'm even bigger than Pluto, make ME a planet!

You see the problem. A consistent classification would require the number of planets to go up potentially into the hundreds. Pluto is 0.002 earth masses. It's a tiny little rock that no-one would have classified as a planet if we'd known how small it was when it was discovered. Why call it a planet and not Eris?

I disagree, it only creates more confusion. People should start using the word hypothesis or hypothtetical instead of theory/theoretical. And I do think we should call it Luna. Think about all the problems the misuse of the word theory has caused on continues to cause to this day.

The words hypothesis and theory have distinct meanings. A hypothesis is essentially an unverified theory. Replacing uses of the word theory with hypothesis will create the impression that we have lost confidence in such theories. I don't think misusing the word hypothesis will counter the effect of misuse of the word theory.

I think the solution is to educate people about what these words mean in a scientific context and make it clear that they are not the same as the colloquial context.

No, I meant it the other way around, tell people to colloquialy replace their use of the word theory by the word hypothesis, which is what they really mean.

And yes, the real theories should still be called theories (example the theory of evolution) I mean that they should use hypothesis when they say something like "I have a theory" which is not the right use of the word theory.

Ah I misunderstood. Yeah that does seem like a more appropriate use of language. I do get annoyed at the constant misuse of the word theory in science fiction for example.

But I have my doubts about whether it's realistic to expect people to change their casual use of that word. I think the best we can hope for is to explain that scientists mean something different when they say theory than they do. I would like to see scientists in popular fiction at least use the terminology correctly.

Also, I'm not entirely sure that the scientific definition of the word should take precedence in non-scientific arenas.

I had a brief look at the etymology of the word and it seems that it did arise before the modern scientific conception of a theory as we understand it. So it doesn't seem right for scientists to claim "ownership" of the word and dictate how others use it.

When the subject isn't science, I don't have a problem with the non-science definition of the word.

neal should go down in history as- "THE JERK THAT KILLED PLUTO!!!"

It's still there. In fact, it's gone from being defined as the smallest planet, to the first known object in a whole new class of objects, the plutoids. It's the king of the plutoids. It's got a whole category of objects named after it. Isn't that better than being the smallest planet?