Astrology Discussion on Twitter

I got into a chat on twitter with an astrologer last week. Long story. Anyway, during the following night, one of her aquaintances sent a whole bunch of tweets as a followup to our discussion, so I thought I'd blog my response instead of a tedious twitter back and forth. Feel free to discuss in the comments! Oh, and apologies for the delay in responding, it's been a hectic few days...but then, you already know that :)

First: Check out this video, it's a classic:

Richard Feynman on what science is:

In Black below are the tweets I received overnight, in blue, my responses. I was originally going to post a single piece, but figured it would be interesting to see the original tweets also.

Science is "Flick the switch, light goes on." Faith is "I hope the Power Co. didn't cut me off - ok

I don't have to have "faith" in astrology, because it observably and repeatedly works.... who's observing, and under what conditions? If we're only taking your word for it, then I'm sorry - not good enough. 

And I know there's little "scientific" evidence for it. -like.....magic, then, no?

Of course they used to pack wounds with cow dung before anyone heard of "penecillin"
 ...and not understanding hydrogen fusion never stop the Sun from shining.

Most skeptical arguments seem to boil down to "I haven't seen any proof that fits my worldview." -no, the view is that if there's sound evidence to support the claim, I'll change my mind AND my worldview.

In other words, Sagan's "Extraordinary proof (etc)" statement may be true, but it also mentally sets
the bar pf "proof" as high as you want it to be. -it should be high. The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the proof required. If we accept astrology as valid, it means that the fundamental laws of nature as we understand them today are completely wrong. These laws have been challenged again and again, and any predictions made using them have been verified and replicated the world over. 

Consider all the many, many, many studies -

about the effectiveness of antidepressants. Antidepressants are a crap shoot, but since we like

to think of the psyche as being the result of chemistry, we want to use chemistry to change it

Billions in research, and the best antidepressants can do is about 60% effectiveness -not aware of this, but I'm sure it's more complicated than a sweeping general statement like that. At a guess, I'd say efficient marketing by manufacturers, incorrect prescriptions to people that don't actually need antidepressants etc. More of a business ethics problem than a scientific one, IMHO. But then again, I don't have the whole story and I'm sure it's VERY complex. 

 But when I as an astrologer come up with 8 or 9 out of 10 predictions right, a skeptic starts with
"The Forer Effect" or "The Barnum Effect" or the "well, that's not how planets work" argument. - these are well documented phenomena. When you say you're "right" - based on what kind of prediction? Specific like "you'll slip on the stairs at work at 2.30pm on March 23rd, but it'll be only a mild sprain) Or vague like "there'll be big changes in 2011" , ie Barnum-type cold-readings? Who decides you're right, you or the client? Under what conditions? 

We've stopped throwing virgins into volcanoes, yet the "superstition" of astrology persists.
Now that just couldn't be because maybe astrology works or something. Noooooo. :) -correct :) 

Every argument I've heard against astrology can be applied to any branch of psychology. -Confusing pop psychology with clinical psychology and psychotherapy. Work by Skinner, Pavlov, and Milgram are among the best known examples of predictive, peer reviewed studies that stand up to the test of time. Psychotherapy doesn't have a lot of fans in the hard sciences as there are problems regarding falsifiability. 

Do I understand the mechanism by which astrology works? Hell no. -does anyone? So why are there no astrological research university departments to discover how it works? Surely uncovering the mechanism of astrology, if there is one, would be a monumental discovery. Einstein, Newton, Feynman, Dirac, Fermi: so long, farewell. Countless Nobel prizes await the discoverers of such a mechanism. I may not understand how every part of a car works, but I can find someone who does. If I want to, I can go all the way up to the engineers that designed it using the cumulative results of centuries of scientific research. 

But peasants packing wounds with cow dung weren't microbiologists either
 ...they just saved lives. Is that "scientific"? Well, they observed results...
 ...and (surprise!) found they were repeatable. No lab involved, but still "scientific." -not sure about the facts of cowdung, but the process is sound. Hypothesis, experiment, replicate. Science is not a body of knowledge, it's a process. The knowledge changes, and in fact does when new evidence contradicts previous observation. The process is to get past the human factor. Ego, error, sloppiness, and fraud can all slip in. Peer review is designed to catch this. It's not perfect (nothing involving humans is!), but in the long run it works. The fact that I'm typing this on a computer that could've run the entire Apollo Program is testament to that, as is the Apollo Program itself. 

Meanwhile, billions of $ pouring into "String Theory," and many careers built on it
So where are all the correct predictions made by String Theory"? Anyone...? Anyone...? -String theory is controversial even in the scientific community. It makes plausible claims but at this moment in time, they are untestable experimentally. Because of this, some physicists claim it's more like philosophy than science. I have no opinion; it's completely over my head, although I did enjoy the Elegant Universe! In the meantime, in mainstream science, astronomers have discovered planets outside our solar system (any incidence for astrology, by the way?) we've rendezvous'd with comets (how do they figure into horoscopes?), the Cassini mission has spent years studying the Saturn system, New Horizons will get to Pluto in a few years, and Messenger will get to Mercurian orbit in March of this year. In the 20th century we discovered that we live in a galaxy, one of billions, in a universe far bigger and older than any of our ancient ancestors could possibly have fathomed. We discovered that the anomalies in Mercury's orbit (precession of perihelion) was due to relativistic effects and can be explained by General Relativity. What advances has astrology made in the last century? Where are the predictions made by Astrology?

Astrology should have nothing to fear from science, any more than any other pursuit
Sadly, most of the skeptics I hear seem to use the "scientific worldview" as the club

they use to dismiss anything that doesn't suit their preconceptions. In other words, they
Make Science their Dogma, and (paradoxically) become as benighted as those they like
to feel superior to. No surprise, really: skeptics are humans too. Humans do that.

But if Science is a controlled, logical search for the truth, I like to think it DOES

apply to Astrology. It *should*. It's just that I rarely if ever see it applied.

This "scientific worldview" that you seem to lament created the world we live in today. The computers we work on, the cars we drive, the medicine we take, the clothes we wear, our telephones, food, longevity. It's true that some skeptics get on their high horses about views inconsistent with science. I know, I'm sometimes one of them. But the scientific method has gotten humanity this far. It's improved our lives (at least in first world countries; geopolitics is another matter altogether) immeasurably in the last century. Imagine our great-grandparents hearing of today's world: mother and child will most likely survive childbirth; all of your children will most likely live to adulthood. You'll most likely live to at least your mid-seventies. We can speak with anyone, anywhere in the world instantaneously. We can get anywhere in the world within 2 days. The body of knowledge we call science changes regularly as new discoveries overturn old ones. The "scientific worldview" means that if you present me with evidence for a claim, I'll listen to it and I'll sincerely evaluate it. If it's convincing, then I'll change my mind. Simple as that. 

Here's a previous post of mine on astrology.

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Sunset on Mars

Isn't that spectacular?

I first saw this on @ProfBrianCox 's "Wonders of the Solar System" and it blew me away. We see sunsets all the time on Earth, but to see one from the surface of another world is simply stunning.

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Astrology - is there anything to it?

Anyone who has studied astronomy at even the most elementary level understands can see that the claims of astrology are untenable. Why? Because we know that we are only a small speck in a universe that's incomprehensibly large and old. The possibility that the stars and planets can have some special effect on our lives outside of the known laws of physics is improbable, to say the least. And even though the daily horoscope on one's favourite website or newspaper might be an amusing daily distraction, plenty of people take astrology seriously enough to spend sigificant amounts of time and money on it.

So just what is astrology? Astrology claims that the position of the sun and planets in relation to the zodiacal constellations (see below) at the time of our birth has a profound influence on our personality and destiny (for the purpose of this discussion I'm referring to "western" astrology, but the same principles apply to Chinese, Indian, Aztec and other variants). We'll take a look at the main, obvious evidence against this, and also why it's still around.

But first: a little astronomy :)

What are constellations? These are groups of stars that resemble terrestrial artifacts, mythological characters or animals. There are 88 recognized by the International Astronomical Union, details here. Some of these shapes take a little imagination to see, others are a bit more obvious. To the ancients, one group of stars looked vaguely like a lion, another a goat, and yet another a scorpion. We humans projected our bronze age world onto the stars, as did the 17th century explorers when they saw the southern hemisphere constellations for the first time. They saw ships prows, telescopes and crosses in the sky. The constellations in the sky are in fact paredolian artifacts.

But they're not fixed. Nothing in the sky is. It's just that our lives are too short to notice movements that take place over hundreds of thousands of years. In all of recorded history the skies haven't changed significantly. We don't notice that the pole star is gradually drifting away from celestial north and that in the future, various other candidates will take its place. In a few hundred thousand years, the constellations we look at will have changed beyond all recognition due to stellar migration. Those that concern us for the present discussion are the zodiacal constellations, those that are grouped on the ecliptic - the imaginary line traced by the sun's annual apparent path in the sky.

So how do the planets come in to all this? The planets move around the sun in fixed orbits. As they do, we see them move "in" and "out" of constellations in the background. This is what astrologers mean when they say, for example, that Jupiter is in Leo: the planet Jupiter, in it's journey around the sun as seen from our perspective, passes in front of the constellation Leo. Of course, Jupiter is a lot closer than any of the stars in Leo, and Leo itself is just an arbitrary collection of stars at various distances from us and each other. We know, thanks to Kepler and Newton, exactly where all the planets are are now, where they were in the past, and where they will be in the future. We also know that when a planet appears to move backwards in its orbit (in retrograde) that it's simply because the Earth's orbit is overtaking that of the planet in question. Here's a good visual explanation for how this works in the case of Mars.

By what mechanism could the planets and stars affect us at our birth? Physics tells us there are only four fundamental forces in the universe. The strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, gravity and electromagnetism. The first two can be eliminated as they concern only atomic nuclei. EM is plausible only if the baby is born outdoors, and even then the light from the planets takes a certain amount of time to get to the earth. So should that be part of the calculation? And what about gravity? Its effect is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two bodies (F=G (mm')/r² if you remember your high school physics classes) so the gravitational force of the baby's mother would be millions of times stronger than our closest celestial neighbour, the moon, never mind any other celestial bodies. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the moon is more massive, but mommy is closer.

Another problem:
Due to precession of the equinoxes the sun doesn't "pass" through these constellations on the dates proposed by astrology proponents. Here are the dates that are commonly accepted as being the "sign" of a person born in that interval (when the sun's apparent movement takes it through the the zodiacal constellations), as compared to when the sun actually crosses these constellations:

Sign	Sun's actual passage through constellation	Commonly accepted Astrological solar passage through constellation
Capricorn	Jan 20 to Feb 16	December 23 - January 20
Aquarius	Feb 16 to Mar 11	January 21 - February 19
Pisces	Mar 11 to Apr 18	February 20- March 20
Aries	Apr 18 to May 13	March 21 - April 20
Taurus	May 13 to Jun 21	April 21 - May 21
Gemini	Jun 21 to Jul 20	May 22 - June 21
Cancer	Jul 20 to Aug 10	June 22 - July 22
Leo	Aug 10 to Sep 16	July 23 -August 21
Virgo	Sep 16 to Oct 30	August 22 - September 23
Libra	Oct 30 to Nov 23	September 24 - October 23
Scorpius	Nov 23 to Nov 29	October 24 - November 22
Ophiuchus	Nov 29 to Dec 17	?
Sagittarius	Dec 17 to Jan 20	November 23 - December 22

A related problem, as evidenced by the table above: The zodiacal constellations aren't spread neatly and evenly across the sky. For convenience, most astrologers use twelve virtual constellations that divide the zodiac into neat, thirty degree regions and work from this instead of using the visible night sky. For example, the sun takes more than twice as long to pass through Virgo (44 days) as it does Cancer (21 days), yet astrology counts them equally, as per column 2 above.

Looking at the table again, you'll see a thirteenth constellation that's rarely mentioned: Ophiuchus. Now why don't we see this in the daily horoscopes? How many people have you met that say "Hi I'm an Ophiuchus, what's your sign?" ? Logically there should be as many Ophiuchuses (Ophiuchi?) as Leos or Capricorns. But there aren't. There are some astrological systems that use the constellations as they appear in the sky, but are in the minority. This detail aside, however, the fundamental theory of all astrology is the same: celestial bodies influence our destiny.

One obvious test of astrology is fraternal twins (to eliminate any possible genetic factors): If astrology were valid, they should have similar lives as they were born under similar circumstances. Time and again we see that this is not the case.

So given that we have this evidence against astrology (and there's plenty more where that came from), why does it persist into the 21st century?

We can boil it down to two principle reasons:

• A fundamental lack of critical thinking skills;
  
• General scientific illiteracy\apathy and a lack of curiosity in how the world works.

Both of these are essential to understanding why astrology, like other pseudosciences, persist into our technological age. These problems can ultimately be addressed by teaching critical thinking skills at both high school and university level (using, for example The Baloney Detection Kit *), and by using creative outreach programs that engage the public at large. As regards the latter, CatherineQ recently wrote a wonderful piece on why engaging people's emotions in popularising science is essential.

In the end, we may think of astrology as a quaint, quirky holdover from the past, and so adopt a "what's the harm" attitude.

At first glance there is no real danger in letting people pursue beliefs that may cost them a little money but are otherwise harmless.Yet there is real harm here. Astrology, like homeopathy and other pseudosciences, promotes magical thinking. No evidence or thought is required. It leads us to take the word of anyone who comes along with a magic solution to any and all problems. And when magical thinking gets together with health care or politics, the results can be disastrous, much more than merely financial. Would you like your leaders making policy based in part on astrological advice?

*Taken from THE reference on critical thinking and skepticism, Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World . If you haven't yet read it, it's a lifechanger.

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Mercury, glorious Mercury, by MESSENGER

Take a look at this.

This is Mercury. That little bright light you sometimes see in the sky, low on the horizon in early morning or late evening. It's a real place. And we humans sent a spacecraft, MESSENGER, out there and it sent back this picture among others.

It never ceases to amaze me that we can do this. Simply spectacular.

More info and pictures:

http://www.universetoday.com/70536/picture-of-planet-mercury/

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Solar Cycle Maximum 2013

So, the solar cycle will reach its maximum in 2013.

I'm betting that when 2012 comes and goes without the end of the world, there'll be solar maximum hysteria right on its coattails. It may even start before then, but it's coming. You saw it here first :)

That's not to say there aren't potential problems. Heightened solar activity such as increased flares and CMEs can wreak havoc on satellites and unprotected electrical grids on Earth. Steps can and should be taken to mitigate these risks. Spacecraft such as SOHO, SDO, GOES, STEREO as well as the the venerable ACE are studing the sun and the space weather environment and can give us advanced warning of increased activity. Check out the links below for more information on solar science and space weather.

New Solar Cycle Prediction (NASA)  (gotta love the "Go ahead and mark your calendar for May 2013, but use a pencil" quote!)

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

Nasa Heliophysics

Current space weather

Severe Space weather social and economic impacts

 

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Miscellaneous....Tuesday!

Ok, so it's Tuesday, I know.....but this is an astronomical miscellania, so doesn't really count as Miscellaneous Monday!

Herschel images of Rosetta nebula stellar nursery:

Spectacular image from the Herschel observatory. I find this absolutely stunning.

Stars are being born.

That alone is worth a pause. Think about it. Stars. Being. Born. Excuse the anthropomorphism, but these events are where EVERYTHING comes from. I wrote a post about this a while back: http://jmahony.posterous.com/twinkle-twinkle-little-star-9

Huge clouds of matter have collapsed gravitationally and the pressure induced is such that nuclear fusion has initiated in the core. We know how this happens, and can describe it mathematically. To see actually in progress is evidence that SCIENCE ACTUALLY WORKS! More info here: http://tinyurl.com/ychg76k

Supermassive Black Hole in Centaurus A :

This is an amazing composite image, in various wavelengths (x-ray, visible and submillimetre), of the Centaurus A galaxy, which has a supermassive black hole at its centre. This shows the extent of this black hole's influence. A jet of X-ray radiation (represented as blue) extends -get this- 13000 light years from its source; the material contained in it seems to be travelling at about half the speed of light! It's  absolutely mindblowing. That something this powerful can even exist really should put us in our place, but of course it's far away (about 11 million light years) and not a threat so, ho-hum, few are impressed. But I am.

For more more on this:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/cena/:>

And speaking of threats.....here's a piece about a fantastically destructive antimatter explosion -  Supernova SN2007bi wreaking unimaginable havoc on its neighbourhood. http://tinyurl.com/ycl75er

If you're interested in destruction in and from space, you could do a lot worse than picking up a copy of Phil Plait's "Death from the Skies". It came in the annual book-orgy that is my Christmas list and it's really excellent, highly recommended.

 

More miscellania soon!

 

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Primitive Stars discovered

Stars from the early universe, formed shortly after the big bang, have been discovered in a "nearby" dwarf galaxy.

http://tinyurl.com/y98wmvm

A related recent post:

http://jmahony.posterous.com/light-shed-on-mysterious-supernova-and-the-st

 

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WISE: First Spectacular Images Released

 

WISE launched in December and has been toiling away since. This is probably my favourite image, as it's a view of M31 Andromeda Galaxy that we haven't seen before. It looks like something a science fiction illustrator would come up with, but in reality it's a false colour infrared picture of this well known galaxy. I like this so much in fact, it's become my desktop wallpaper!

Some great interpretation of WISE's newest images, as usual, from the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait:http://tinyurl.com/ylluozz

WISE mission home page: http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/

 

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Light Shed on Mysterious Supernova and the Star Behind It

A supernova that lasted an unprecedented 555 days, SN2007bi, appears to have been caused by a star that technically should not exist....today. The monster that led to this supernova ought to have been more than 300 solar masses, but this seems to contradict current theories, backed by observational data. A protostellar cloud would gravitationally collapse to form a star at 150 solar masses or less, and would never get even close to 300 solar masses. Stars this large just can't form.

However, that's in todays universe.

Back in the early days, when the universe was less than a few hundred million years old, the universe consisted only of hydrogen, helium and a little lithium which were forged in the first three furious minutes following the Big Bang. Heavier elements had not yet been formed as the universe cooled too quickly after the Big Bang to continue building elements, and the stars that would eventually synthesise them didn't yet exist. Huge amounts of these light elements had to come together before reaching the critical mass necessary for gravitational collapse that leads to stellar ignition, hence the truly enormous mass of these early stars. These first stars burned quickly (quickly for stars, ie a few million years) and brightly before exhausting their reserves of hydrogen and exploding in supernovae, creating heavier elements and sending them out into the universe, in the process reducing and eventually killing off any possibility of these types of stars from forming in the future. But why did it it burn so long? A hypothetical "pair-instability"-type supernova occurrs in stars this big. Hypothetical because it wasn't believed that stars this big could exist.

So how could stars this big exist today?

This supernova was seen in a dwarf galaxy 1.6 billion light years away, too nearby to be from the early universe. From observations, these dwarf galaxies seem to have significantly less of the heavier-than-lithium elements than they should have for their size. The implication here is that these dwarf galaxies may in fact be leftover "islands" of the early universe! The low mass could explain why they never accumulated to form fully sized galaxies.

This is why I love cosmology. The timescales, the distances and the concepts are so awesome, the processes so ferociously elegant....it's humbling to think that a complex glob of carbon compounds on a rock orbiting a yellow star in an insignificant galaxy can even exist to contemplate such things.

For lots more on this amazing story: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527470.900-primordial-giant-the-star-that-time-forgot.html?full=true

 

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Solar Dynamics Observatory Launches !

The Solar Dynamics Observatory launched today from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It will study the sun's activity in order to predict, amongst other things, solar storms that can potentially knock out terrestrial power grids. Solar flares, Coronal Mass Ejections and sunspots will lose some of their mystery as we learn a lot more about the sun over the next few years from this mission.

If you've read any of my earlier posts, you'll recognise this phrase: I love it that we can do this stuff; it's soo freakin' cool!! And with Twitter, you can ask knowledgeable people about this stuff as it happens. The 21st century so rocks!

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SDO launches from

The Solar Dynamics Observatory launched today from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It will study the sun's activity in order to predict, amongst other things, solar storms that can potentially knock out terrestrial power grids. We'll learn a lot about the sun over the next few years from this mission. Solar flares, Coronal Mass Ejections and sunspots will lose some of their mystery!

If you've read any of my earlier posts, you'll recognise this phrase: I love it that we can do this stuff, it's soo freakin' cool!! And with Twitter, you can ask knowledgeable people about this stuff as it happens. The 21st century so rocks!

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Solar Dynamics Observatory Launching Tuesday

As reported by the BA, some really cool info here, check it out!

http://tinyurl.com/yfgohvy

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New Solar Observatory Launching Feb 9 2010

The Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is nearing readiness for the planned launch date. More info here:

http://tinyurl.com/y878la7

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Martian Avalanches caused by springtime on the red planet

Fantastically coolesome images of Martian avalaches taken by HiRISE - details, with customary dry, only-the-facts-ma'am delivery ;-)  from the BA:

http://tinyurl.com/y9gzqhf

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The Saturn System, in all its glory, thanks to Cassini

Feast your eyes on beautiful Saturn. There are some heartbreakingly gorgeous images here, but be warned: you might end up staying for a while, so make sure you have adequate time!

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/?start=1&category=1

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WISE is calibrating and already releasing images!

WISE is being calibrated and has released this preliminary image:
http://tinyurl.com/yh5afuc

Here's the BA's take:
http://tinyurl.com/yefpbxo

Here's the press release:
http://tinyurl.com/yar36gr

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The hubble hits just keep on coming!

Check out this latest image from Hubble: http://tinyurl.com/ykt547o  Just think, each little speck is a galaxy, with hundreds of billions of stars...mindblowing! You can actually see the oldest ones in the bigger picture. They're the red blobs, displaying that famous red-shifting, and - get this - we're seeing them as they were up to 13 billion years ago!  The image was created by combining several different images, taken in ultraviolet, visible light and near-infrared. (bigger image here:  http://tinyurl.com/ya3h3vp)

We are so small.......

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WISE opens its eyes!

Seems I somehow missed this earlier......but great news indeed!

http://tinyurl.com/yhcjxl4

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Blue Moon.....you saw me standing alone.....

So there's a Blue Moon coming up.....not literally though. It won't change colour or anything, but it's an informal term for the second full moon in the same month. The other big news is that there will also be a partial lunar eclipse, see the BA's blogentry below for more info.

http://tinyurl.com/ydovv7v

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Sailing on Titan's Hydrocarbon Seas

A proposal for an unmanned mission to Saturn's moon Titan will apparently be submitted to NASA soon for funding. In summary, it will be a type of "boat" that will explore the hydrocarbon sea in Titan's northern hemisphere.

More here:

http://tinyurl.com/y9sqa44

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