How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

By Mike Brown
Unabridged
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Brown’s brisk, enjoyable How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming chronicles the whole saga [of the demotion of Pluto] and, in the process, makes Pluto’s sad fate easier to take. If we’ve lost a planet, we’ve gained a sprightly new voice for popular science…Writing with an appealing wit, Mr. Brown resists the glibness to which science popularizations sometimes fall prey. Instead he leavens his scientific account with a memoir of how he discovered the joys of becoming a husband and a father during the same period that he thought he was discovering planets. It’s a refreshing twist on stereotype: the scientist neither as madman nor mystic, but mensch…The cheerful, unaffected tone makes it hard not to like Mr. Brown, and to root for him when he finds himself in the midst of controversy… Amazingly, the author spins these parliamentary proceedings into a nail-biting roller-coaster ride: the skullduggery of secret committees, the raucous debate, the white-knuckle final tally. How many planets will we end up with? Eight? Twelve? Hundreds? Will the astronomers accept a definition that satisfies cultural expectations—but is bad science? Or will they find the courage the kill Pluto?... Brown narrates this entire story with so little rancor and so much generosity to rival astronomers that he can seem too good to be true. He even keeps his cool, and his class, while his research is plundered and his reputation attacked. It turns out you can kill a planet and still be a pretty nice guy.
The Wall Street Journal
The solar system most of us grew up with included nine planets, with Mercury closest to the sun and Pluto at the outer edge. Then, in 2005, astronomer Mike Brown made the discovery of a lifetime: a tenth planet, Eris, slightly bigger than Pluto. But instead of its resulting in one more planet being added to our solar system, Brown’s find ignited a firestorm of controversy that riled the usually sedate world of astronomy and launched him into the public eye. The debate culminated in the demotion of Pluto from real planet to the newly coined category of “dwarf” planet. Suddenly Brown was receiving hate mail from schoolchildren and being bombarded by TV reporters—all because of the discovery he had spent years searching for and a lifetime dreaming about.

Filled with both humor and drama, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming is Mike Brown’s engaging first-person account of the most tumultuous year in modern astronomy—which he inadvertently caused. As it guides readers through important scientific concepts and inspires us to think more deeply about our place in the cosmos, it is also an entertaining and enlightening personal story: While Brown sought to expand our understanding of the vast nature of space, his own life was changed in the most immediate, human ways by love, birth, and death. A heartfelt and personal perspective on the demotion of everyone’s favorite farflung planet, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming is the book for anyone, young or old, who has ever dreamed of exploring the universe—and who among us hasn’t?