Miscellanea

psychoceramics got me thinking about percival lowell, who is probably one of my favorite examples of the uncomfortable boundary between being wrong and being worth taking seriously.

lowell became famous, or infamous, for his observations of mars. giovanni schiaparelli had described canali on the martian surface, and lowell became convinced that these were artificial canals constructed by intelligent martians attempting to move water across a dying planet. he spent years observing and drawing them at the observatory he founded in flagstaff. he also wrote about mars obsessively. first there was mars, then mars and its canals, and eventually mars as the abode of life. you can almost see the theory becoming more elaborate in the titles alone. by the early twentieth century many astronomers were already skeptical of the canals, which they could not reliably observe, but lowell kept going.

this understandably did not help his reputation. there is something very psychoceramic about producing a myriad of increasingly elaborate details from an observation whose existence is itself in dispute. but i think the more interesting thing about lowell is that being spectacularly wrong about one thing did not make him incapable of being interesting about another.

lowell became convinced that another planet existed beyond neptune. he called it planet x and spent years searching for it from lowell observatory. the best part of the entire story is that he actually photographed pluto and didn't notice it. pluto was sitting there as a tiny point of light on photographs produced during his search, but it was much fainter than the planet he thought he was looking for. lowell died without knowing that the thing he had spent so long trying to find had already passed through his photographs.

the search was eventually resumed. lowell observatory hired clyde tombaugh, a 23-year-old farm boy from kansas who had never gone to college and had built his own telescopes. he had mailed the observatory drawings he made of jupiter and mars, and they were apparently good enough to get him a trial job. the offer was wonderfully vague about what he would actually be doing. photography, apparently. janitorial work, possibly. he was very much an assistant rather than some established astronomer arriving to solve the mystery. within a year they gave him the search that had defeated everyone before him.

tombaugh's method was wonderfully tedious. he photographed the same part of the sky on different nights and put the plates into a blink comparator, switching rapidly between them. the stars stayed in place. something closer would appear to jump. he did this over and over and over again until he found a tiny moving point.

it was pluto.

and then an eleven-year-old girl named it.

venetia burney, an english schoolgirl, suggested pluto, after the roman god of the underworld. the suggestion eventually made its way to flagstaff and the observatory chose it. there was also a particularly satisfying accident in the name: PL were percival lowell's initials. even the astronomical symbol for pluto incorporated a P and an L.

also, because i had to know which pluto came first: the planet did. the dog who would become pluto appeared as a bloodhound later in 1930, but he wasn't actually mickey's dog named pluto until 1931. disney says the name was most likely inspired by the newly discovered planet. so pluto the dog is apparently named after pluto the planet, which was named by an eleven-year-old girl, partly selected because its first two letters happened to be the initials of a dead astronomer who had already photographed it without realizing it. good.

pluto would probably be my favorite planet if it were still allowed to be one, if only because the history is so fun. i also just like lowell observatory. there is something charming about the whole chain of events taking place there: lowell building an observatory partly because he was obsessed with martian canals, looking for a planet he never got to see discovered, photographing it anyway, and then a young assistant arriving years after his death and finding the tiny thing by watching dots jump back and forth.

of course, pluto is no longer technically a planet. the definition adopted in 2006 requires a planet not only to orbit the sun and be massive enough for gravity to make it nearly round, but also to have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. pluto fails the last part, so it is a dwarf planet.

neil degrasse tyson was actually on this surprisingly early. when the rose center for earth and space opened in 2000, the exhibits didn't put pluto with the terrestrial planets or the gas giants. it was displayed with the icy objects of the outer solar system instead. tyson headed the science committee behind the exhibits and consequently spent years being yelled at by people who thought he had personally killed pluto, well before the official decision in 2006.

i think what i like most about the discovery is that nobody in it quite gets the story they were expecting. lowell's calculations did not really predict pluto in the triumphant way the story is sometimes told. the supposed irregularities that motivated the search for planet x largely disappeared once neptune's mass was measured more accurately. pluto happened to be there anyway. lowell looked for the wrong planet for reasons that turned out to be wrong and helped create the conditions under which the right object was found.

there is probably something worth keeping in that. being wrong does not make every observation useless, and being right at the end does not retroactively make every premise correct. sometimes somebody spends years looking in roughly the right direction for the wrong reason, photographs the answer without recognizing it, dies, and leaves the rest of the problem to a farm boy and an eleven-year-old girl.

last edited: 11 september 2026