Article January 15, 2007 Issue

WHAT I'M LEARNING FROM PLUTO

BY DAVID A. CORNELL

Many kids—and even lots of adults—were talking about the planet Pluto last summer. A group of professional and amateur astronomers called the International Astronomical Union (IAU) got together to think about the questions "What is a planet?" and "Is Pluto a planet?"

The IAU had discussed these questions several years earlier, but hadn't come up with answers that lasted. Everybody wanted to get into the act, as if their happiness depended on what the group decided. This time, they had lots more to go on than before. Modern telescopes and cameras have found more than 100,000 new small solar system bodies in the past 20 years. Armed with new information, and realizing that Pluto was very different from all of the other planets, the IAU decided that Pluto shouldn't be called a planet anymore. Instead, they put it at the top of a new list called "dwarf planets." When news of this decision broke, some folks seemed very sad, almost as if they had lost a special friend.

I've come to feel that there's another answer to the question "What is Pluto?"—one that rests on a commitment to viewing the entire universe as resting on a spiritual basis. This answer emphasizes the concept that all things, planets included, really represent spiritual ideas in the divine Mind. Consequently, their stature doesn't change, no matter what someone calls them. Like everything in creation, their true substance is made up of the spiritual qualities they embody, which are not physical or matter-dependent. Mary Baker Eddy, the woman who founded this magazine, once wrote, "Suns and planets teach grand lessons" (Science and Health, p. 240). Could we be learning one of those "grand lessons" today from all the talk about Pluto?