Welcome Back Pluto! We're glad that you're a planet again.

We call them strawberries even though they are not berries. Scientifically theyre not even a fruit. Tomatoes are technically a fruit but tomato paste is legally classified as a vegetable. If were being scientific peanuts are not nuts and hermit crabs are not crabs. So why is it so important that Pluto cant be called a planet? Dont blame science. Do you know the scientific definition of a metal? Or a continent? or a mountain? Or a river? Or a species? Or a civilization? It turns out none of these words have any scientifically rigorous definitions. Do we need a rigorous scientific definition for the word planet? Maybe not. The vast majority of planetary scientists recognize a subtle truth about the IAUs definition; its about as useful as the fuzzy green casserole leftovers from last month growing in the back of someones fridge. It should be thrown out with the garbage. In terms of scientific utility it is utterly worthless. When it comes to defining terms that dont need to be defined or naming insignificant things like the 97058th asteroid the IAU is very persnickety. But when it comes to naming the largest features in the solar system like the Kuiper Belt it seems that no one is in charge. Most astronomers agree that Kuiper was the wrong name for it. Gerard Kuiper wasnt the first to describe it didnt discover any Kuiper Belt objects and believed it didnt even exist. So how did we get stuck with that name?Why was it so important to change the status of Pluto but not fix this blunder? If Pluto is just another Kuiper Belt object then Clyde Tombaugh discovered the first Kuiper Belt Object when he discovered Pluto. Maybe the Kuiper Belt should be called the Tombaugh Belt. There are political forces within the IAU to prevent that from happening but politics should have no place in science. If we are going to be scientific we must also give up the obvious falsehood that the four gas giants belong in the same category as the four terrestrial planets. Literally everything about them is different often by orders of magnitude. Composition density scale topology celestial neighborhoods... These are clearly two separate categories of things. Putting them in the same category is profoundly bad science. The only similarity they share is that they look like stars when viewed from Earth with naked eyes.Regarding the status of Pluto there is only one obvious solution to this conundrum. The word planet belongs more to the realm of history and literature than to science. We must divorce the word planet from any hard rigorous scientific meaning. We can do better. Biology chemistry meteorology and more have logical and useful systems of taxonomy while astronomys taxonomy is an ad-hoc kludge. This book does not solve that problem. It only exposes the truth of it and suggests ideas for other people to ponder. Perhaps one of those people can become the Carl Linnaeus of astronomy.