Astrology, as I have presented in this thread, is elegant, simple, coherent and consistent. As presented by Phil Plait in his BAUT article, it is a stupid muddle. We can’t both be right. Phil’s piece is at http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc...ml#intro#intro My critics here have pointed out correctly that until quantized, astrology is not compelling. The first step to address this criticism is to present astrology as quantizable. For that it needs to be consistent, so the gross inconsistencies identified by Phil’s critique need to be addressed.

In claiming that “astrology has no basis in reality whatsoever” Phil observes “there are lots of flavors of astrology... Some of the claims they make are inherently contradictory.” As a critique of pseudo-science he is on the mark. But he does not address whether a coherent proto-science might be behind these various cultural forms. As I have argued at #83, a proto-science of astrology can be explained consistently in terms of planetary effects. Sure, there are astrologers (and tea leaf readers) who believe all sorts of impossible things. Incompatible ideas cannot both be right. My view is that sidereal astrology, based on stars, is a magical throwback, and that Western astrology, based solely on the solar system, has coherent epistemic foundations. Nothing Phil has said disproves my view. His comment “precession …shows that Sun-sign astrology is rubbish anyway” is based on sidereal assumptions and is easily answered. My previous points on this thread about the tropical zodiac show this is just another straw man – sun signs are a function of the seasons, and the stars are irrelevant to astrology.

Phil’s broader concern is that astrology is “eroding people's ability to think clearly”. I agree with him on this. Acceptance of incoherent magical myths in popular culture is a danger to the rationality of public discourse. Like fundamentalist religion, popular astrology often ignores evidence and validates an anti-science attitude. However, this critique of popular culture is not relevant to the question of how astrology might find a rational basis.

My main beef with Phil is his comment: “astrologers claim that all the planets have equal (or at least comparable) effects…. This means, by the astrologers' own claims, distance must not be a factor with this force.” This is simply wrong, as my point below about sun and moon demonstrates. Phil has created a straw man (“but hey! Distance is no issue”) as a result of leaving the sun out of his tide table, so his amusing comments about non-effects of distant galaxies are irrelevant. Astrology is a function of complexity interactions within the solar system. Distance is a big factor. Our DNA grooves to the rhythm of the regular gravitational force of the planets. Slowly.

Phil refers us to his page about gravity and the planets (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planets.html) including his very helpful explanation of tidal gravity, with a table of effects of the moon and planets. I found this very interesting, but was surprised that Phil left the sun off his list. The numbers from his table are listed below, adding the sun, and also a truck, a doctor and a few decimal places. For good measure, I have also added a one ton truck one kilometre away and a 100 kg doctor one metre away, as these have been discussed on this thread. Phil introduced the useful innovation of considering the distance from earth to the moon as one unit to compare tidal effects. I have called this distance the Zappa. The inverse figures are shown for reference where the actual number are near zero – ie Mercury has ~0.0% tidal influence, but this can also be seen as one three millionth the effect of the moon. If you want to check the numbers, paste them into a spreadsheet or email me.


Planet
Mass Distance from earth Gravity Effect Tidal Effect
Unit (10^22 kg) million km Moon Unit (Zappa) (Moon=1) (Moon=1)
Formula M Z M/
Z*Z (Inverse)
Z*Z/
M M/
Z*Z*Z (Inverse)
Z*Z*Z/M
Mercury 33.0 92.0 239.6 0.01% 12,500.0 0.0000324% 3,083,809.8
Venus 490.0 42.0 109.4 0.60% 166.7 0.0050607% 19,760.1
Mars 64.0 80.0 208.3 0.02% 5,000.0 0.0000956% 1,045,509.6
Jupiter 200,000.0 630.0 1,640.6 1.00% 100.0 0.0006120% 163,391.6
Saturn 57,000.0 1,280.0 3,333.3 0.07% 1,428.6 0.0000208% 4,808,317.1
Uranus 8,700.0 2,720.0 7,083.3 0.00% 50,000.0 0.0000003% 302,291,201.0
Neptune 10,000.0 4,354.0 11,338.5 0.00% 100,000.0 0.0000001% 1,078,706,562.2
Pluto 1.0 5,764.0 15,010.4 0.00% 1,666,666,666.7 0.0000000% 25,027,067,391,176.6
Moon 7.4 0.4 1.0 100.00% 1.0 100.0% 1.0
Sun 138,147,700.0 149.6 389.6 12,300.17% 0.0 31.6% 3.2
Truck 0.00000000000000000010 0.000001 0.000002604 0.00% 74,000,000.0 1.4% 74.0
Doctor 0.00000000000000000001 0.00000001 0.000000026 0.00% 74,000.0 135135.1% 0.0

I checked the formula against Phil’s numbers and got the same results as he did – you can look at his original table but you might like to double check or correct me if I have made an error regarding the doctor and the truck, as these numbers are counter-intuitive. Of course, these are just an amusing side point, as, unlike the sun and planets, there are no doctors or trucks in space who have regularly orbited with the earth for the last five billion years to contribute to a regular structural pattern in our DNA.

By this calculation, the sun has 123 times more gravitational influence than the moon on the earth, and 31.6% of the moon’s tidal effect. Leaving the sun out of the table has distorted Phil’s list and underpins his false comment that that for astrology distance doesn’t matter. Once the sun is included, the rankings in this table roughly match the level of influence generally claimed by astrology for the planets. Contrary to Phil’s claim that distance doesn’t matter, most astrology says the main astrological influences are from sun, moon and ascendant, and that the influence of the other planets is smaller. These figures match that claim. I have argued previously that complex adaptive sensitivity amplifies the effect on DNA of the gravitational regularity of the planets. These figures support that claim.

A further point. These planetary tides may look tiny, but remember, the ocean is big (at least in terrestrial terms). 71% of our planet surface is ocean, with average depth of 3.8 km, so the ocean has about 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water in it. Applying the percentages from the table above, we get the following amounts of water shifted daily by each planet:
Planet Earth Ocean Water shifted by each planet each day
Unit Teralitre
(cubic kilometre)
Formula M/Z*Z*Z*Ocean Volume
Mercury 447.25
Venus 69,799.36
Mars 1,319.21
Jupiter 8,441.34
Saturn 286.85
Uranus 4.56
Neptune 1.28
Pluto 0.000055
Moon 1,379,244,518.75
Sun 435,463,840.36

By this calculation, even humble “non-planet” Pluto shifts 55 Olympic swimming pools of water on earth by tidal power every day, and has done so on every one of the 1.8 trillion days the earth has existed. Since the dawn of time, Pluto has moved 100 trillion megalitres of earth water. Think of that next time you sneeze at the god of death. And please check my maths.

Phil makes a valid point when he says “Astrologers rely on our inability to remember when they are wrong, and our almost unfailing ability to see patterns in random noise.” This is true about much fortune telling, but not about real planetary influences. Planetary relations with earth are not random, and there is scope for much more statistical study of them, following Gauquelin. In this regard, Phil refers us to the paper Is Astrology Relevant to Consciousness and Psi? by Geoffrey Dean and Ivan Kelly. I thank Phil for this reference. Dean’s criticisms must be answered before any respectability can be earned. I referred to another paper on Dean’s website at #83 http://www.rudolfhsmit.nl/h-chai2.htm which shows the unscientific confusion among astrologers. However, I don’t accept Phil’s claim that “the paper demolishes, utterly, any notion that astrology has any effect at all.” Indeed, Phil leaves out a significant comment immediately following the part of their abstract he quotes, where Dean and Kelly state “the possibility that astrology might be relevant to consciousness and psi is not denied.” Certainly, they give an entertaining tour of woo-land, but not much more. They show that some astrologers imagine themselves as mystic shamans and that in laboratory tests, astrologers fail to match charts with people. This negative result could indicate only that astrological effects are swamped by terrestrial effects. It tells us nothing about whether planetary effects exist. As I have argued here, the best way to assess planetary effects would be large scale epidemiological tests, which have not been done. The methodology of the cited tests, like the BAUT test at Scientific Test of Astrology , seem designed to find a very ambitious total astrological effect, but the reality could be much more hidden by noise.

“The Great French Birth Time Switcheroo”: In the article Phil refers to, Dean and Kelly comment, amazingly, that “a tiny but consistent surplus or deficit of rising or culminating planets at the birth of eminent professional people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Gauquelin, 1983) was consistent with parents adjusting birth data to suit popular beliefs, which in those days could easily be done without detection (Dean, 2002).” What Dean is saying here, get this, is that the only way he can explain the powerful consistency of the Gauquelin statistical correlations of planets and birth times, independently replicated by skeptics, is that French parents colluded with doctors and nurses to write down an incorrect birth time for their newborn baby in line with the parent’s astrological aspirations. For example, I want my son to be a champion athlete, so, knowing that athletes correlate with the Mars effect, I bribe the nurse to write on the birth certificate that he was born when Mars was rising. Dean and Kelly call this “popular”. And my brother wanted his son to be a doctor, so he winked at the obstetrician to falsify the birth record to state his son was born when Saturn was rising. All this in a society where astrology was frowned on as a disreputable unscientific relic, especially by doctors. I do not know of documented cases of such corruption of medical staff in France, but perhaps Dean and Kelly have evidence for their speculated ‘artifact’??

Phil’s final point: “this one irritates me personally, astrology takes away from the real grandeur of the Universe.” The approach I suggest here indicates the reverse. Our minds are the most complex pieces of metal known in the universe. They follow mysterious underlying planetary rhythms which connect us to the cosmos. This is grand.