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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Immutable firmament?
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2011 Jan 15, 21:59 +0000
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2011 Jan 15, 21:59 +0000
"Apache Runner" said >The most amusing moment was when he described Ptolemy's method for >figuring out how long someone lived. It had to do with the >ascension of the Sun the day after someone's birth. I asked him if >this was a tradition. He said "No, I think Ptolemy just made it up." Yes, it is thought clever these days to laugh at astrology - and those who laugh loudest are those who know least about it. The essential ideas of (Western) astrology were born 5000 years ago in Babylon. Since then, they have undergone a continuous cycle of refinement where the philosophical model created to describe correlations between two sets of observed phenomenon (star/planet positions and events here on earth) was tested by seeing if it could predict future correlations. If the model was found wanting, it was adjusted to account for the larger database of observed phenomenon. If you think that sounds like the scientific principle, you would be correct. Astrology is the oldest science and while astrology may not have the proven validity of the hard sciences, it could be argued that there is more proof for the validity of astrology than, say, the main principles of economics or psychology. Geoffrey Kolbe