Astrology Ain’t So Bad, In Theory

From my layman point of view, astrology seems to be about making predictions in people’s lives, based on the positions of stars and planets.  In various newspapers, I have seen astrological predictions called horoscopes.  Using my date of birth, I can determine my particular Zodiac sign, which corresponds to one of the twelve Zodiac constellations.  I can then read the prediction – typically covering the current or next day – for the group of people born in the same fraction of the year as that Zodiac sign.  I also recall seeing posters for each sign of the Zodiac in one or more gift shops, supposedly telling what someone born under that sign is like and maybe what they might encounter in their life.

Many people regard astrology as just a bunch of superstitious nonsense.  Is it?  Whenever I have read my horoscope, it rarely has been relevant.  More often, it has been either too vague to be meaningful, or it has made references to situations that simply didn’t apply.  Maybe I don’t know how to use a horoscope, or maybe what I read was really just for entertainment purposes.  Having little luck with astrology myself, I’m not going to argue whether it currently works.  I’m more interested in the question of could it work.

Both the motion of celestial bodies and human events are cyclic in general.  Moons repeat their orbits around planets (with some variation), planets around stars, stars within their groups, and the groups around the center of the galaxy.  Similarly, I have heard many times that human events tend to have cycles.  In the very least, we experience daily, lunar, and yearly cycles.  And there are cycles in the stock market, the economy, politics, fashion, etc.

Can these different collections of cyclic systems in the sky and on Earth really be correlated?  I would think a temporary correlation should at least be possible.  For a simple example of correlation, suppose you start a stopwatch and then start filling a pan of water at the kitchen sink.  You might notice that the water level in the pan rises at the same time that the elapsed time on the stopwatch increases.  Is the stopwatch causing the pan to fill with water ?  No.  Does the stopwatch temporarily indicate how much water is in the pan?  Yes, especially if the water fills the pan at a fairly steady rate.  Is that a useful correlation?  Yes, and it’s hard to ignore the large market of kitchen timers.

But predicting human events isn’t as simple as watching a stopwatch.  Fortunately there are other similarities that could help.  Objects in space and human groups on Earth seem to have some structural similarities, since both tend to form hierarchies.  Space dust and rocks in space might form planets and moons, which form planet-moon systems, which can orbit stars to form solar systems, leading up to star clusters, galaxies, galactic clusters, and – at some point – the universe.  Similarly, individuals can form families, families can form cities, cities can be grouped into states, provinces, and/or countries.  My home country of the United States was formed from smaller pieces, namely the thirteen original colonies.

So there are some similarities in structures, but what about the activity within those structures?  Without going into a lot of technical detail, there are things called fractals and chaos.  A fractal is a mathematical structure with a quality called self-similarity – a smaller piece strongly resembles a larger piece but at a smaller scale.  There are many better examples of fractals in nature, such as tree branches, clouds, mountains, coast lines, etc.  Following a tree branch out from the trunk, you see where it forks in maybe two or more different directions.  Follow one of those forks, and it might itself fork into smaller branches, just like the big branch did, except maybe a little different.  We’ve already seen this kind of fractal-like self-similarity in celestial bodies and groups of people.

Fractals are related to a branch of math called chaos theory.  A process with mathematical chaos is inherently hard to predict from initial conditions.  Calculating from the initial state, the outcome of the process can fluctuate in some way and possibly never settle on some final stable state, if allowed to go on forever.  Besides the fluctuation, a small change in the initial state can lead to wildly different results.  This goes against the idea of expecting similar starting points to lead to similar outcomes.  This sensitivity to initial state is said to be one of the identifying traits of chaos.  As it turns out, a star system that has even a relatively small number of celestial bodies can be chaotic.  What about human events?  A simple example, research exists that describes stock market prices with fractals.

One would think chaos would make the future of celestial motion or human events hard to predict.  It does for long-term predictions, but short term predictions are still possible, especially with general trends.  Weather forecasts are one example.  I’m guessing that some chaotic systems are mathematically similar to each other, so that the behavior of one system might be useful in predicting the behavior of another.  A Web search on “period doubling” supports this.  Self-similarity in the process also makes one part of a chaotic process resemble another.  The turbulent flow of fluids is chaotic, and yet a small eddy can resemble a large eddy.

Suffice it to say, there are some mathematical similarities between the motion of the celestial bodies used for astrology and some activities of humans, enough that one could serve at least as a short-term model for the other.  And to me the the idea of using that collection of cycles in the sky as a model for what happens in our cycles here on Earth is absolutely brilliant.  It’s like a giant slide rule in the sky.  (A slide rule is a mechanical computing device.)  And the fact that so many cultures all over Earth started making astrological predictions so long ago, without the aid of our modern computers or modern math or the Internet, makes it all the more impressive.  Could all those ancient cultures be wrong?  Yes, but maybe they were still onto something.  In theory, astrology could actually work somewhat, as far as short-term predictions go.

(c) Copyright 2018 by Mike Ferrell