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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Mr. Tulip, here is my whole point exactly. If the tidal influence of the planets is too small to measure, how, oh how can the other planets have an influence on us?!? The mass of the ocean is far, far greater than the mass of a person. I'm sorry, but it just doesn't work this way.

The problem is your insistence that it is gravity that is performing this action. And what is this whole fraction stuff? Where does that end? 1/131? 74/3816? I can get as fine as I want, the implication being here that every point in the orbit is either one or very, very close to a whole number fraction. So, to write this in mathematical terms, the planets exert "heightened gravitational combined effects" when its position is a rational number and does not exert "heightened gravitational combined effects" when its position is an irrational number.

By “too small to measure” I meant that, for example, tide heights when Jupiter and Sun/Moon are conjunct might average 1 millimetre more than when Jupiter and Sun/Moon are square, but this would need exact measurement over long periods to discern. I do not know if this has been measured or calculated, but really it is a side issue. The human mind is far more complex than the ocean water mass, which is large but simple. The human mind is the cumulative result of eons of evolution in which the steady cycles of the planets have been a constant background. As I argued previously, it is this cumulative evolutionary adaptation within a stable complex system that provides the basis for our sensitive attunement to planetary cycles. By contrast the ocean water does not evolve and so lacks sensitivity to such cycles.

On fractions, the argument is that their power steadily falls away with distance from unity, and that each aspect has an orb of between 5 and 20 degrees. The biggest effect is unity (conjunction) followed by half (opposition), third (trine) and quarter (square). After that, the sixth (1/3 x ½ = sextile) is generally recognised, while the fifth and seventh are sometimes claimed to have minor effects. Higher fractions of the sort you mention are swamped by the orb of these simple aspects. For example your suggested fraction 74/3816 is just under 2% so is well within the orb of conjunction. The Fourier diagram I previously mentioned at Figure 9a at http://cura.free.fr/xxv/25garcian.html shows a claimed mathematical illustration of the strength of planetary effects around the circle, showing how the bigger fractions have bigger effects.

The problem with that is that the tidal forces created by the planets are INSIGNIFICANT. From some basic calculations, a truck or bus passing 50 feet away exerts almost as much tidal force on you as jupiter does at CLOSEST APPROACH. So, why isn't tourist bus position an extremely important part of astrological calculations?

On the one hand, I do not find Robert Tulip's theories at all compelling. Yeah, maybe miniscule rhythmic gravitational effects can have an influence over aeons of time, but I doubt they have a real effect on evolution.

On the other hand, I continue to feel disappointed by the regulars who contribute to this thread. People who know better are taking issue with things Mr Tulip has not actually said. For instance, cjl's post about trucks and buses... Tourist buses have NOT been passing by at regular-as-clockword intervals for the past 5 billion years.

I don't think Mr Tulip is right, I don't think his ideas are compelling, and I don't think they are leading to a Lorenz-like revolution. As I mentioned before on this thread, I am as hostile as anyone on BAUT towards anything that smacks of astrology. But you know what? I might be wrong. He's not saying that a conjunction of Mars and Venus in your birthsign means you're going to have an argument with your partner this week. As I read it, he is saying something more along the lines of, IF you display certain character traits, it is SLIGHTLY MORE LIKELY that the planets were in a certain configuration at the time of your birth. That is NOT the same as saying you WILL display certain character traits if the planets were in a certain configuration at the time of your birth.

Again, I emphasise that all my understanding of science rebels against this sort of notion. But that is not reason enough to rule it out.

Furthermore, Mr Tulip is clearly NOT someone who evades questions, resorts to insults, changes the subject, or uses any of the other "techniques" of woo-woos. The fact remains, I think he is wrong; I HOPE he is wrong. But these are not good enough reasons to dismiss what he has to say.

I agree with Paul, that Mr. Tulip has done a good job of sticking around and not doing a drive-by-posting or being unwilling to answer questions.

The real issue is his insistance upon forces that have not demonstrated the effects that he claims. Mr. Tulip has stuck with gravity for his theories about how the planets affect people. But, gravity has to be one of the most studied forces, and while we don't know the mechanics of gravity at the smallest scale, we know incredibly well how Saturn affects Earth via gravity.

Show where in the equations for gravity it is important what kind of matter it is? Gravity is very indifferent over what the mass is, only how much mass it is. It does not matter if the mass is water, lead, mercury, spam, silicon, diamond, brain matter, kidney, golfballs, or anything.

Then, just like cjl said, the gravitational forces from jupiter/saturn, etc. can be calcuated to be smaller than the gravitational force from a truck or any other largish object. So, then all the way back to a question I asked several weeks ago, is it better to have a skinny or a fat doctor devlier you? If my neighbor is an owner/operator of his own 18 wheeler, do I want him to park his truck on my side of the street or his? If I grew up near a quarry, is that bad or good?

If gravity were really the force at hand, these are pertinant and important questions. Otherwise, some very extraordinary proof would be needed to show why all the previous experments on gravity were performed incorrectly.

That is irrelevant though (unless you have been around to be impacted by the planets for 5 billion years). What is relevant (apparently) is the tidal force at your time of birth. When a passing bus has as much impact on that as the largest planet, one must rethink whether the planets could really have a significant impact.

But if I understand what Mr Tulip said, it is the extremely-long-term effect of tiny-but-regular gravitational forces on DNA that counts - and DNA has been around for billions of years. As I see it, it's not about the gravitational force (or gradient) at the time of birth so much as the place in this long-established rhythm that a birth occurs. Put another way, DNA is like a dormant life-form billions of years old, and I am one of many non-dormant manifestations of it. I "woke up" 43 years ago at a certain time in its cycle.

Now I don't find this compelling, partly because I cannot see any evolutionary advantage to DNA knowing when Saturn is rising, for instance. And partly because Mr Tulip's posts are so wordy at times that I've got lost reading some of them. (They'd probably be better if they began with a clearly and simply worded premise, followed by back-up evidence that again is as simply worded as possible. I do not think that is what we did get.)

But again, the insistance that it is gravity is also completely unsubstantiated and contrary to everything we know about gravity. Look at this chart of amino acids: http://prowl.rockefeller.edu/aainfo/solub.htm, the most dense as a solid is 1.6 times the density of water. And again, gravity does not care what the matter is acts upon, just how much mass is there. Since the density of amino acids, DNA, water, and much of the rest of the body is similar, how can gravity act on just the DNA? Gravity should act on the fluids around the DNA as well, and therefore, from the DNA's point of view, there is no net movement. This still doesn't even address the question of the significance of these exceptionally tiny gravitational forces, which again, simple calculations show are pretty insignificant.

Yes! FWIW this is the kind of argument I want to see. Addressing the sort of issue Mr Tulip has actually raised, as opposed to attacking the third cousin of the point he appeared to raise.

Hello again, with thanks for recent points of engagement, discussed below. As I noted previously, my aim in this discussion is to isolate a scientific research program from the chaos of astrological ideas. I have found the reactions to my efforts on BAUT immensely helpful in clarifying this task, so thanks again. Some info about me - I was born in 1963, am married with two teenage children, and work for the Australian Government in the Papua New Guinea overseas aid program, managing private sector development and academic research. My university studies were in philosophy, with a Master of Arts Honours degree on the place of ethics in Heidegger’s ontology (for the really keen it is at http://www.geocities.com/rtulip2005/...Heidegger_MA/).

During my studies I became intrigued by the prospect of establishing astrology as a scientific research program in the sense articulated by Imre Lakatos in response to Karl Popper’s theory of falsification (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos). However, I found that astrology was a topic of such polarization, with astrologers hostile to objective science, and the objective sciences hostile to astrology, that reasoned discussion of it is highly problematic. I have always rejected the so-called postmodern critique of objectivity (eg the relativist claim that science has the same epistemic status as religion), but I consider that conventional scientific views about objectivity tend to be too narrow in what they exclude.

Could there be a middle ground? I have read widely during my sentence of twenty years of boredom, in science, philosophy, theology, astrology, history and other areas. Now, partly in response to the intriguing challenges posed by BAUT, including in responses on this thread and in other discussions on the merits of qualitative claims, I am reading a book called World Changes – Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science. For this post I will respond to recent comments, but I hope to return soon to the problems raised by Kuhn’s views on the philosophy of science.

I welcome these comments as an intelligent and fair response. I can understand why readers would not see my claims as compelling, but there is a continuum in science from the possible (unproved but not disproved) to the persuasive (likely truth) to the compelling (generally accepted). If I can achieve something between possible and persuasive I will have made a good start. My ideas are a possible answer for real scientific problems. The point about Gauquelin’s findings about birth times and planets is that he found statistical anomalies which have been independently replicated and which cannot be explained by existing theory. What I am trying to do is construct a mathematical framework in which the Gauquelin planetary findings can be recognized as possible.

Just considering gravity as force, Bignose is correct to say gravity is indifferent to what the mass is, but I would not expect astronomers would claim the physics of force is sufficient to explain the biology of sensitivity. The causal framework needs a biological context – noting that life itself is far from being understood in terms of just the laws of physics. Any truth in astrology must be coherent with gravity and depend on it, but astrological effects are a complex result of the relation between the organism and the cyclic system in which it exists.

Restricting an explanation of astrology to physical force alone is a bit like saying photons are indifferent about what they hit. However, a picture taken by a camera will display a much more detailed record on film of the photons at a particular moment than a less complex receptor will. Just as photography cannot be explained purely by the physics of light, although it depends on it and is coherent with it, astrology cannot be explained by gravity alone, although gravity is the force which makes astrology possible. In photography, we have to ask what it is about camera film that creates its sensitivity to the photons. Similarly, the claim behind astrology is that life has such sensitivity to the planetary cycles of time that it imbeds them in its evolving character. This is an a priori claim which is corroborated by the Gauquelin findings but as yet lacks compelling mathematical explanation.

Has gravity really been so well studied that science understands the cumulative effects of regular cyclic patterns on sensitive structures? This is where the Lorenz chaotic sensitivity model is relevant. Sure, physics explains relations of masses in motion, but we cannot reduce biology to physics, and astrological effects are primarily biological. I look at these issues against the scientific framework presented by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, where he says “Our genes made us. We animals exist for their preservation and are nothing more than their throwaway survival machines.” This provocative claim implies that genes are more significant over time than individuals, that stability through time is a key mark of significance, and that genes, by their near-permanence, have in some sense more reality than the ephemeral individual who is the gene’s current transmitter from past to future.

The Gauquelin effects show clearly that sensitivity to planetary position is imbedded in some successful human genes. Gravitational rhythms are a necessary part of the ‘conditions of possibility’ of this observation, and therefore should be of interest to astronomy in its interface with the life sciences. However, the explanation for how this genetic imbeddedness works is not possible using physics alone.

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/.../selfish.shtml is a good source on Dawkins philosophy of genetics.


This question of evolutionary advantage is key. The way I read Dawkins on cumulative adaptation, any consistent factor in the ecological niche of an organism can become an object of competitive selection. Over the immense time periods of evolution, genes that are more sensitive to any given factor will out-compete less sensitive genes where there are statistically real procreative benefits. For example amoebas with light/dark sensitivity out-compete those lacking this mutation, and have more competitive offspring . In the tree of life this increasing adaptive benefit of light sensitivity explains the ever-increasing complexity of sight up the chain to the eagle’s eye.

An interesting cyclic example is how cicadas have evolved to be dormant for a prime number of years (eg 13 or 17) because those which come out after a composite number (eg 12 years) will be more often eaten by predators who rapidly develop population cycles of 2,3,4 or 6 years, whereas the prime number of the cicada cycle surprises the predators. Planetary effects on human genetics may be something similar. Inheritance of a proclivity to be born when Saturn is rising is possible in principle, given the fact (discussed above) that rats have a gravitational sense of when the moon is below the horizon. Foetal instinctive sensitivity to planetary position is possible as a more complex example of this same gravitational sense.

Planetary effects are not just about magnitude of force, but sensitivity of the receptor. The gravitational force on DNA is of course exactly the same as on any inert matter of similar composition and location. DNA differs from inert matter in that it evolves, ie it replicates more when it is well adapted (attuned) to its habitat, of which gravitational rhythms are a part. This explains why DNA could be vastly more sensitive than inert matter to gravitational cycles.

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.

I'm sorry; I must have missed where you showed evidence that this was the case.

__________________
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!"

Okay so my summary comment about DNA was slightly flippant. Sorry.

Gillianren, you made several posts in this thread (#10, #29, #38) disputing my basic scientific observation that Western astrology has nothing to do with the stars. Contrary to your claims, my view aligns with the comment by Ivan Kelly in the article referenced by Phil Plait, Concepts of Modern Astrology - A Critique that "the Western zodiac is independent of the stars."

Given your previous comments I am not at all surprised that you missed the basis of my comment about DNA. I have been explaining it patiently throughout.