agreed


the thing is that, while I agree with you fundamentally, there are characteristics of people which coincide, when planets are at a certain position. generally speaking.

and astrology, if done right, takes at least 8hrs or so to be done throughly. astrology is not a newspaper "thing". a personal astrology, specific to you, is much, much more complicated than this.

But the charts I've had done that took time have inevitably still been wrong. You've seen the test we did here, right?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

how do mean "wrong" ?

no I didn't see the test.

Here you go.

Not only did astrology not work, but in fact, the results ended up so that the number of matches were smaller than the expected number for random guesswork (though well within the realm of possibility for random choice). In other words, it failed spectacularly. And yes, the one who drew up the charts spent quite some time on them.

And as a result of the experiment, changed his mind, as documented in this post:Science and Astrology: they diverged many years ago, and for good reason.

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I mean wrong as in very frequently, even the vague descriptions don't describe me very well. In the test referenced, I was given four horoscopes, and I really wanted to go with "none of the above"; the one I picked as closest to an accurate description of me wasn't mine.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The same was true for me in that test - none matched me very well, and the one I picked as the best (though still hardly a perfect match) wasn't mine.

Regarding gravity, the point is that planetary effects are about earth plus two planets, not earth plus one, so distance between earth and one planet has only minimal effect compared to aspect effects. In the case you cite, the three bodies Saturn, Sun and Earth will stand in a direct line (opposition aspect) on 10 February. The Fourier diagram I referred to previously (http://cura.free.fr/xxv/25garcian.html) claimed to show that whole fraction angles (1/2, 1/3, etc) between planets around the ecliptic correspond with heightened gravitational combined effects. This three-planet effect is clearly the case regarding sun, moon and tides, with full tides corresponding to sun-moon conjunctions. Much smaller effects result from lunar distance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide#Tidal_terminology) .

Your use of the term ‘overpower’ is far too crude. In the above tidal example, the primary effect is the daily cycle of the earth’s rotation against lunar gravity, secondary effect is the lunar orbit around earth creating monthly cycles with the sun, and lunar distance is a tertiary effect. The tertiary effect is often ‘overpowered’ but is still real and measurable over time. Mathematically, there are also tiny tidal effects of the planets on earth, probably too small to measure. My argument is that these real effects of planetary cycles are imbedded in our DNA, due to their unchanging permanence over the four billion years of life, in ways that structure more complex cycles of events on earth.

On prediction, you are setting the bar too high. Prediction within chaotic systems such as human life should be about statistics, not one-off fortune telling. Regarding the Saturn Sun opposition I do not want to try to predict a specific event, but could analyse this aspect statistically over long periods for possible effects. No one can predict if you will go to the beach on Saturday, but if the weather is hotter than average I can predict more people will tend to go. Based on Gauquelin’s work I cannot predict if you will become a leading scientist but I can predict that leading scientists will continue to be more likely than average to be born when Saturn is rising. This is a specific testable prediction. Similarly, as detailed in Richard Tarnas’ Cosmos & Psyche, cycles of scientific innovation are claimed to correlate with Uranus aspect cycles. Tarnas presents these in anecdotal form but they could easily be rendered into a rigorous statistical format by independently listing say the top 500 innovations of the last century and then examining whether Uranus alignments tend to coincide with higher than trend levels of innovation. This test has partly been done at http://www.astrology-research.net/re...eureka/iii.htm


The test done at BAUT (#52 above) showed that people find it hard to interpret astrological correlations, not that these correlations do not exist. A more rigorous test would be as follows:

1. Invite a large number of people (eg 1000) to provide birth dates of five or ten people they know well.
2. Link this birth data to an aspect database to generate reports of astrological descriptors for planetary aspects, ignoring house, ascendent, moon, and signs.
3. Provide each survey respondent with the reports of descriptors for the birth dates they provided, without any personal identifiers, and ask them to match the descriptions with the people.
4. Analyse responses for statistical significance.

This is a test of non-astrologers' ability to perceive a connection between astrological aspect descriptions - rendered in words - and their own opinions or knowledge of "individuals they know well". It would be preferable to use people who are unfamiliar with astrology and conduct the test in a controlled environment. A consistently higher than chance result would demonstrate existence of planetary effects.

Another possible test:

construct large epidemiological datasets using medical information to obtain population data on dates of birth and people's ages at the time of medical events, and then mine this data to find out if any medical conditions correspond in statistically significant ways to outer planetary transits to themselves - such as the Saturn returns at age 29 and 58, Uranus opposite Uranus at age 40-44, Pluto square Pluto etc.
“Fractal” has 128 times as many Google hits as “Hyperdimensional” (12,300,000 against 96,200), showing it is over one hundred times more widely used. But seriously, this comment implying that my use of the term ‘fractal’ is meaningless opens a difficult conceptual question – is there any mathematical legitimacy in the traditional cosmological principle “As Above So Below” beyond the observation that gravity and the laws of motion operate on earth as well as in the heavens? I am asking this in order to explore how modern quantizing methods can help to provide a scientific basis for this traditional claim.

Within a Mandelbrot set we see the “As Above So Below” principle of self-similar fractal scalability in operation, with larger shapes provides the guiding structure reflected by their smaller contents. A tree may similarly be considered as a model of the fractal geometry of nature, with the vein pattern of the leaf mirroring the structure of the trunk and branches, each part reflecting the whole. I am asking whether and how the solar system can be seen as a fractal, and what this might imply for planetary effects on complex natural systems on earth. TBM’s comment implies this question is not legitimate.

Earlier I mentioned Kepler’s warning not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What he meant was that the old Aristotelian cosmology should not be entirely abandoned as a result of the new objective understanding of the elliptical orbits of the planets. In looking at TBM’s comment against TS Kuhn’s framework of paradigm shift, it is interesting to see it as an example of how the scientific community tries to apply its objectivity too widely by denying meaning to subjects it does not understand. In talking of paradigm shift, my object is not to criticize the content of science but to suggest that truth can be found in areas now considered incompatible. For example geocentric cosmology has been scientifically abandoned since the disproof of epicycles, but Kepler’s point was that rejection of epicycles does not disprove the existence of planetary effects on earth. Geocentric cosmology has its own legitimate mathematics which can be the object of scientific study. My belief is that fractal geometry provides a mathematical framework for this.

As an example of an effort to integrate modern and traditional thought, consider the following from Sir Isaac Newton: “…That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like it which is below... all things … arose from one… so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.” (http://www.levity.com/alchemy/emerald.html with apologies for woo source)

These points, although obscure to astronomers, are simple logical axioms of nature. The fractal theme arising from these axioms is that the unified causality of natural systems means all entities in a system (such as the solar system) share a single causal origin, and so the harmonic inter-relations between any two parts (eg Jupiter and Saturn) have a fractal reflection in all other parts (eg earth). An analogy to model this fractal reflection is that wind blowing on a tree will make all leaves move in a similar way. Intelligent creatures on one leaf who see the next leaf shiver may postulate some synchronic a-causal principle because they cannot see the wind causing their sympathetic vibrations.

Just wave your hands to make the test results go away, and continue on as if nothing had changed.

Yet another reason why I find what ATMers propose and their methods so boring.

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With respect, the negative result from this tiny BAUT study on astrology, which to me looks quite over-ambitious and therefore badly designed, proves nothing except the ability of some people to confirm their prejudices. Medical research studies often produce conflicting findings and require meta-analysis to compare diverse results. The implication that anyone who questions the methodology of a medical study can be accused of denial would be far from the spirit of scientific progress. Ironically, it is the mainstream scientific community who have been guilty of the charge you level at me, by their refusal to investigate a mathematical basis for the replicated findings from Gauquelin.

How is the test poorly designed?

We did not know which was ours out of a group of 4 possibilities, and had to choose a best fit. Clearly, if astrology cannot produce a reading that was recognizable as specific to a particular person, it is useless. "Prejudices" do not come into play, since the subjects did not know which one was theirs. As for the complaint about the size of the test, are you claiming that astrology is only barely better than random chance, and therefore not detectable in this size study? Because if it were as accurate as proponents claim, it would have certainly shown greater effect than it did in that test.

Astrology has been guilty of over-egging the custard, in the sense that astrologers have claimed effects are bigger than they really are. There is a very large amount of 'noise' surrounding astrological effects, and of course terrestrial factors are a bigger influence on personality than planetary effects. However, a small effect is a real effect, and can be picked up through statistical methods, hence the larger studies I suggested previously. The problem with adversarial debate is that people see it as all or none, hence your dichotomy "recognisable or useless" is too severe. Last night I listened to a violin virtuoso play the same piece on a $300,000 instrument and then on a $10,000,000 instrument, and a commentator said he couldn't detect the difference... Some expertise and training is needed to recognise subtle differences.

If the difference truly is that subtle between astrology and random chance, then why bother? It is hardly enough of a difference to have any sort of accuracy...

Interesting, the most expensive violin is the Lady Tennant Stradivarius violin, which was sold by Christie’s New York in April 2005 for $2.03 million US dollars.

Price often has nothing to do with quality. Just as astrology always has nothing to do with reality and science.

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BTW, WikiHOW usually has useful stuff. Today they delved into useless stuff.

At least, near the bottom they added this caveat:

Warnings

• Astrology is not a science.

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http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/s...5-7642,00.html "AN anonymous businessman has given the Australian Chamber Orchestra a $10 million violin - but the gift comes with strings attached. The 263-year old instrument, made in Italy by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu, has to be kept in a bank vault when it is not being played by the ACO's artistic director and star violinist, Richard Tognetti. Also, the ACO refused to reveal the name of the benefactor who called Tognetti last year and said he wanted to buy him a violin."

Just like a businessman to inflate the price of a charitable donation.

Meanwhile re the pretentious mess that is astrology, Phil's taken care of this subject quite nicely. There's no reason to rehash any of this all over again.

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