...never seen--singlehandedly raised the astronomical data bank a hundredfold. As Kepler would later reflect, Brahe had the building materials for cosmology, but he lacked an architect. Kepler became that architect. It was a conjunction fated to alter the course of astronomy.

Last August, Prague was teeming with astronomers, roughly two thousand of them. They came to evaluate an astronomical data bank that in the past few years has increased by orders of magnitude, an immense expansion factor that only the observations of Tycho Brahe rival in their comparative impact. Telescopes in mountain observatories, plus spacecraft above the atmosphere combined with modern electronics, have reaped a bounteous harvest of exciting new results.

But as seen from the Prague press office of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the world was fixated on two far more mundane questions: would little Pluto, in the frigid realm beyond Neptune, still be considered a planet; and if so, would some of his icy playmates in that remote zone also be ushered into the exclusive planetary club?

The IAU had gotten itself into this feeding frenzy by a procedural question of nomenclature that only indirectly involved Pluto's status. For this is one of the things international unions do. They follow in Adam's footsteps by credentialing names. The International Union of Biological Sciences, for example, oversees a committee that establishes the rules for the naming of birds and shells and other animals. And the International Astronomical Union, in its very first General Assembly, in Rome in 1922, established the list of eighty-eight constellations accepted today. Committees under its aegis...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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