We made you and we can break you

Count me among those who are not in favor of Pluto's delisting as a planet, but if we must change it's better to go back to 8 planets than to water down the definition to every over-sized bit of space ice. Still, I love the response of Alden Tombaugh, whose father discovered Pluto.

But the son of late U.S. astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who identified Pluto as the ninth planet in 1930, told CanWest News Service that the scientific method "guided my father all of his life," and that if reason now dictates Pluto's reclassification as a planetary 'dwarf' then "he would have been all for it" - provided politics didn't "bias" the outcome of the long-running controversy.

"This doesn't change my father's achievement," said Alden Tombaugh, a retired banker in New Mexico whose father's ashes are currently on a nine-year journey to Pluto aboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. "Science is an evolving process, and he was a part of that process."

No whining or complaining. If that's what science says, so be it.