My hypothesis was that some planetary aspects (angles between planets at multiples of 30°) would occur more frequently than chance on the birth dates of the eminent scientists listed by French statistician Michel Gauquelin. It will be recalled that Gauquelin proved that this group were more likely to be born when Saturn is rising or culminating, and that his findings were replicated under hostile skeptical peer review. Hans Eysenck noted that the Gauquelin database had not been interrogated to find consistent trends in planetary aspects, so I have now done this.

Gauquelin’s data is readily available at http://cura.free.fr/gauq/17archg.html. Within this site, http://cura.free.fr/gauq/11gdA2.txt has birth data for 3646 eminent European scientists. I converted this text data into a simple Excel list of birth dates. I then converted the ephemeris at http://www.achernar.btinternet.co.uk/fm.html, with dates from 1891 to 2100, into a digital spreadsheet. As well as allowing powerful aspect data mining, this spreadsheet can generate informative charts of all planetary positions for any contained time period, viewed from our geocentric perspective.

My test examined the group of 532 out of the 3646 scientists who were born between 1891 and 1910, and counted how many of this group were born when each of the 39 planetary pairs listed below were within 1.5° of a multiple of 30° apart. 28.6° or 31° would return a positive while 32° degrees would not, etc, and so on for the 3° orb each side of 60°, 90°, 120°, 150°, 180°, 210°, 240°, 270°, 300°, 330° and 0° aspects. The probability of a positive reading for any one aspect in the general population is about 10% (3° x 12/360 = 1/10), but can be calculated exactly from the ephemeris for each planetary pair. Average frequency of each aspect for a random sample of 532 people should be about 53.2.

The result was positive but weak. The strongest effect was the aspect between Mars and Saturn, occurring 64 times in the sample. The binomial calculator at http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/binomialX.html shows this or larger result occurs only once in 65.42 samples (1.53%), given that in the period 1891-1910, Mars-Saturn aspects occur only 9.14% of the time. (N=532,K=64,P=.0914). The aspect between Venus and the Node of the Moon was the most frequent in the sample, occurring 67 times, but its overall frequency during the period (9.77%) is slightly more than for Mars-Saturn. The probability of the Venus-Node result for the scientist group was one in 50.42 (1.98%) for this or larger result. Other aspects which appeared in the scientist group at a rate seen in less than 10% of random samples were Pluto-Node, Venus-Mars and Venus-Saturn.

Most interestingly, the trend lines in an aspect frequency chart of the two sub-groups 1891-1899 (324 scientists) and 1900-1910 (208 scientists) closely matched, when aspects are sorted by frequency in the total group. For the earlier born group, the trend line rises strongly from 6.8% to 12.2%, for the latter group it moves from 7.7% to 11.3%, and for both groups together (all 532) the frequency trend rises from 7.1% to 11.9%. The fact that these trend lines move strongly in the same direction shows that in each separate decade, the group of eminent scientists were more likely to be born at times when planetary aspects differed from the population mean in consistently similar ways. If there were no planetary effect, these trend lines would either be flat or move in opposite directions.

Tests were conducted for the following 39 aspects: Saturn-Node; Jupiter-Pluto; Jupiter-Neptune; Neptune-Node; Mercury-Mars; Sun-Mars; Venus-Uranus; Saturn-Pluto; Sun-Jupiter; Jupiter-Uranus; Saturn-Neptune; Sun-Node; Mars-Jupiter; Mercury-Pluto; Mars-Node; Sun-Pluto; Jupiter-Node; Sun-Saturn; Uranus-Node; Jupiter-Saturn; Mars-Uranus; Mercury-Jupiter; Venus-Jupiter; Mars-Pluto; Sun-Uranus; Mercury-Neptune; Venus-Pluto; Mars-Neptune; Mercury-Saturn; Mercury-Node; Sun-Neptune; Venus-Neptune; Mercury-Uranus; Saturn-Uranus; Mars-Saturn; Pluto-Node; Venus-Mars; Venus-Saturn; Venus-Node;

All data for these results is freely available.

Robert Tulip