Planet X

Spare a thought for the poor astrology community who, either way, will have their work cut out coping with the decision by the International Astronomical Union today. Either Pluto gets to remain a planet, and thus so will Xena and up to 50 other bodies circling the Sun, or it gets struck off the roster.

Despite the fact that Neptune, Uranus and Pluto were unheard of in antiquity, astrologers have gamely incorporated them into their calculations. This is effectively an admission that astrology was bunk until Pluto was discovered early in the last century. Now it looks as if those calculations were all flawed. What’s worse, they may have to contend with a planet named not after a Greek God, but a character from a TV show. The indignity of it.

5 comments

  1. James,

    Just to play devil’s advocate for astrologers, you’re missing the point. An astrologer might argue that astrology is the prediction of human affairs, particuarly their effect on human minds, based on the movement of /known/ celestial bodies. As astronomers discover new bodies it does not undermine the premise of previous astrology. It just means that that the collection of /known/ bodies has changed. And of course it must make sense at a certain post-modern level that our /minds/ are affected by those things with which we are aware and not those of which we are not.

    Don’t expect it to make sense. You’ve got to stop thinking in a mechanistic Newtonian way and get with the completely random quantum programme.

    Far out.

  2. Being /slightly/ more serious for a moment, I am sometimes struck by the coincidence of hippie-ness and new science.

    In one of Neale Walsh’s “Conversations with God” books (Google it) there is a bot where God suggests “all things are affected and even created by the person who observes them” which the narrator suggests is “new age nonsense” and God points out is actually basics quantum physics.

    There’s a point here about this resembling the relationship between politicians and electors but I can’t quite formulate it in my mind at the moment.

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