Collegiate Times

Do you believe that horoscopes apply to you or anyone and reliably predict anything that will happen in someone’s life? If so, is there any reason why you believe in them? Do you know anything about the belief system of astrology besides the fact that people make horoscopes?

Astrology claims that at birth and afterwards, the positions of the stars and planets greatly influences events in people’s lives, despite the fact that the positions of the stars change very little in a given year or decade or century even. In what way would the position affect someone? Is it a gravitational or electromagnetic force? Well, neither. Since your doctor at your birth actually has a stronger magnetic pull on you than all of the planets combined (the doctor’s gravitational force being 34 times that of Jupiter’s) is some indication of the position of the doctor with respect to the stars. Also, if it were gravitational, astrology would have no way to predict anything for thousands of years since any accurate distances to the planets have only been known in the last century.

The interaction couldn’t be the two short-range forces, the weak and the strong force, since the scales are too small, and it couldn’t be electromagnetic! Most objects are neutral so any electric field would have no measurable influence on the planet, much less a person. So if it’s not due to the fundamental forces, and it interacts with us, what would be causing it? If it affects us it must have a natural cause. Any other explanation of supernatural effects is a moot point and would not be predictable in the way astrologers claim they can predict things.

The idea that one’s sign has a play over his personality has often been demonstrated to be wrong, and the method to determine one’s sign used thousands of years ago has not been updated. Because of the earth having a slow wobble with a period of 25,700 years, the position of the constellations changes when compared to the months.

The signs were originally determined based on what constellation was blocked by the sun. As the Earth goes around the sun, the sun falls roughly in between some constellation and the Earth. The constellation blocked by the sun at one’s birth indicates one’s sign. So the constellation Aries fell on March 21 and ended around April 19 initially, but now this same 30-degree patch of sky is blocked by the sun between April 19 and May 13, formerly the time when Taurus was blocked. Astrology has not updated though, and it still predicts certain personality characteristics with something other than the original definitions of someone’s actual sign.

The validity of characteristics based on a person’s sign has even been tested. Every so often a survey is done of a group of “time twins,” two people born within five minutes of each other. These people are all the same sign, and are born when the stars move extremely small distances compared to that of a month’s duration, so the idea is that they should have very similar characteristics. But no study has found any correlation between the birth time of a person and his personality.

Other studies have been done where each person is given a horoscope for another sign, and told that it is for his sign. He is then asked his opinion on how well it applies to him. Again no correlation has been found. The horoscopes can apply to simply too many people and aren’t specific enough, and therefore lose any predictability.

It is estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on astrology in some form or another in the U.S. each year, and even Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer in the 1980s to make sure that meetings were planned on good enough days astrologically. A very thorough paper “Is Astrology Relevant to Consciousness and Psi?” was written by Geoffrey Dean, which explains very well the errors in astrology, in case there are those who would like to have a longer and more well written explanation of why no one should pay a dime toward astrology.