While the press has been busy lamenting the demotion of Pluto to mere “dwarf planet” status and fretting about how museum exhibits, grade school textbooks and solar system kits will all have to be changed, we can’t forget that reexamination of definitions and nomenclature is an important part of science. It’s a good sign that scientists are gaining new knowledge and need to incorporate it into an existing body of knowledge.

An interesting commentary in the Globe today reminds us that we need to have good definitions and names for things to allow scientists to study them properly. We needed systems for naming chemicals and organisms before breakthroughs could be made in chemistry and biology.

And so while it may seem amusing, trivial or even ridiculous that there’s a controversy over what is a “planet”, it’s a perhaps a good sign that more discovery is yet to come from the world of astronomy.