Back when Pluto got deplanetized I was bummed, because I liked Pluto.
Mickey Mouse had a dog named Pluto and Manfred Mann’s song Pluto the Dog was one of the baddest of badass all instrumental tunes of the whole rock and roll era, and brings back happy hippie memories. I felt it was unfair to say it wasn’t a planet just because it was small, that’s like saying that England is not an island because it is too big, or the Caspian Sea isn’t really a sea because it’s obviously just a big lake, look at a map. Also, tradition. I felt that we should continue to consider Pluto a planet because we’d always considered Pluto a planet, which is pretty weak reasoning, but that’s the way I felt.
In one universe, and out in another
Also, it messed up all the good mnemonic phrases. We could no longer say “My very eager mother just served us nine pizzas,” and “My very eager mother just served us noodles” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. It just sounds wrong.
I have come to terms with Pluto not being a planet, even if I’m not thrilled about it.
But I didn’t have at all the same reaction to today’s news that Black Holes might not be Black Holes at all. I don’t think they’re going to stop calling them Black Holes, because why? There’s nothing else out there that you’re going to start calling Black Holes, so they might as well retain the name, but Stephen Hawking thinks they might not be exactly what we thought they were. Scientists thought they were massive suckholes in space, that took everything in and let nothing out, and science fiction writers liked to use them as an intergalactic secret passage, because science fiction demands a way that we can travel to other galaxies and other universes, resolve the problem, save billions of lives, and get back within an hour, minus 20 minutes for commercial messages.
Hawking reckons they are more like big under-sink garbage disposals: they suck stuff in, but they chew it up and spit it out, shredded. I don’t know. I’m not as smart as Hawking, and I’m not as smart as any of the scientists he is trying to debunk, so any conjecture on my part would be worthless.
All I’m saying is, I don’t care as much about Black Holes as I did about Pluto. They just don’t have the charm and personality.
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