Book 1 Post 1 - How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

As a kid, I dreamt of becoming an astronaut. I remember being amazed in first grade when my teachers told me that a Vietnamese astronaut (Pham Tuan) had already been to orbit in 1980. I had dreams going even further; I wanted to grow up and travel to the edge of our solar system in search of a new planet I would get the right to name myself.


14 years later, even after deciding to major in Business, I still love learning more about space. My favorite classes in high school and college were not about business but instead physics and math. So, a book about how Pluto, one of my favorite planets as a kid, got downgraded to a mere dwarf planet intrigued me.


After reading ~40% of the book, Mike Brown has exceeded my expectations so far. In the book, he highlights how astronomy is intertwined with human history and societal developments. He writes about how linguistics, like definitions of planets, shaped how astronomy developed and how people saw the world around them. He writes about how technological advancements transformed the field over time, like how the invention of digital cameras completely changed how he worked with the 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory compared to his predecessors. In doing so, he teaches us about astronomy and contextualizes it to help us understand its relationship to the rest of human society.


In addition to astronomy, Mike Brown also writes about his professional and personal life. One of my favorite details is how he fell in love with planets by watching Saturn and Jupiter tango across the night sky. It felt very wholesome, intimate, and relatable. Another one of my favorite details is the motif of the moon and how it changes throughout the book. When Mike was just a young professor at Caltech, the moon was his nemesis since it stood in his way of using telescopes to look at distant stars and planets. But since falling in love with Diane, Mike found something else important to him besides his work, so the moon being full didn’t bug him as much.

 

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