The word "disaster" comes from Latin words meaning "bad star" - which shows that the Romans thought that the stars could influence our lives. They were wrong, but even today, many people share this belief.

There are several types of astrology. "General Astrology" looks at how humanity is affected by supposedly "significant" alignments of the stars and planet. "Genethlialogy" is a branch that looks at your life based on the positions of the stars and planets at the moment of your birth, while "Catarchic Astrology" tries to find the most auspicious time to start a given task.

The idea that stars express Divine Will goes back some 2,300 years to the Babylonians. They could see with the naked eye seven objects (that they called stars) that moved through the sky - the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. They believed that the gods lived in these "stars", and controlled the destinies of individuals and nations. They thought the gods controlled us either directly by meddling in our affairs, or indirectly, by the intricate relationships of these stars with each other.

To describe the positions of these stars more easily, the Babylonians divided the sky into 12 slices (they had a numbering system based on 12, not 10 as we have). Today, we call these 12 slices the 12 Houses of the Zodiac - eg, Aries, Pisces, Aquarius. The Babylonian astronomers/astrologers closely observed the sky, decade after decade. They noticed that these seven stars seemed to move through the Houses of the Zodiac in totally repeatable ways - coming back to the same location in the same house at the same time, year after year.

But this is where the big problem is.

The constellations shift by about 1o every 72 years, thanks to the drifting of the Earth's spin. The Earth spins around an imaginary spin axis that runs through the North and South Geographic Poles. But it doesn't spin true. If you have ever spun a top, you'll see that this spin axis soon begins to wobble. The spin axis will slowly sweep out a complete circle.

The same thing happens with the spin axis of the Earth - except that it takes about 26,000 years to sweep out a complete circle. So roughly every 2,000-and-a-bit years (26,000 years divided by 12 Houses), the star signs get shifted by one House. The horoscopes you read in the daily newspapers (and that are often written by the most junior journalist on that shift) are wrong by one House. You should be reading the star sign before.

But this is not a new discovery. Back in 129 BC, Hipparchus was the first to find this shifting-of-the-stars when he compared the astronomical records with what he saw with his eyes.

But there's another major problem with astrology, and that is there are so many problems with Astrology, that it's hard to know where to begin.

First, just when is a baby born? Is it when the mother's waters break, or when the baby's head appears, or when the baby's feet come out, or when the cord is cut, or when the placenta is delivered? For that matter, if the stars are indeed so powerful, why should the thin layers of the mother's abdominal wall and uterus provide any barrier to these supernatural forces?

Second, when reading the daily horoscope, how can one-twelfth of the world's population all fly down to Tasmania for a hot weekend with a tall handsome stranger? How would the airlines cope with the unexpected load?

Third, why are all the people born on the same day of the same year so different? Surely, they should have similar appearance, lifestyle and behaviour?

But most importantly, none of the detailed statistical studies that have looked at astrology have found any merit in it. For example, a psychologist from Michigan State University, Bernard Silverman, looked at 2,978 married couples and 478 couples who divorced. He found absolutely no correlation between which couples divorced, and which couples were born under alleged "incompatible" signs.

The famous French Astrologer, Michael Gauquelin, offered free horoscopes to any reader of Ici Paris, if they would give feedback on the accuracy of his supposedly "individual" analysis. He wanted to scientifically test his profession of astrology. He sent out thousands of copies of the same horoscope - and 94% of the readers replied that his reading was very accurate and insightful. What they didn't know was that the horoscope was that of a local mass murderer, Dr. Petiot, who had admitted during his trial that he had killed 63 people.

So while it's handy to blame our misfortune on the stars, Julius Caesar was probably closer to the truth when Shakespeare had him say, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves..."



abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s1266452.htm
Karl S. Kruszelnicki