How astrology paved the way for predictive analytics | 7wData

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If you type “Why are millennials” into Google, the top result completes the question with “obsessed with Astrology”. Never mind the answer; the question alone is likely to incite exasperation among scientists, most of whom would condemn astrology as pseudoscience at its most fatuous and infuriating. Astrology may have long been debunked – there is no reason to suppose that our fate is written in the stars – but it still endures, endorsed by countless trashy magazines and newspapers (and some supposedly serious ones), feeding off our own, self-absorbed vanity.

But the truth, however annoying, is that astrology played an important role in the history of science. Many of today’s scientists might be embarrassed to acknowledge, for example, that the 17th-century German mathematician Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, also cast horoscopes for his boss, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.

A new book by American data scientist Alexander Boxer, who has a doctorate in physics, aims to shift that view. A Scheme of Heaven: Astrology and the Birth of Science explores how astrology was a regular part of what was then called natural philosophy, at least until the time of the so-called scientificrevolution in the 17th century that Kepler and Galileo heralded.

Boxer explains how a belief in the “astral influences” of the celestial bodies – the stars, constellations and planets – on events and people on Earth had motivated careful studies of the night sky since ancient times. The extraordinary detail and accuracy of the astronomical observations of scholars such as the Greek mathematician Hipparchus, in the second century BC, were due at least in part to a conviction that only with excellent data could astrological forecasts and diagnoses be reliable.

“The sun, moon and stars were useful for navigation,” Boxer tells me. As for planets, he says, in early times “the motivation for planetary observations had always been astrology”.

There’s no doubt too that astrology had useful spin-offs, much like those often claimed for big science projects such as the Apollo missions and the Large Hadron Collider. Astrological calculations by the ancient Babylonians led them to make new discoveries in geometry. The importance of observing and measuring the heavens helped stimulate the development of accurate instruments such as the astrolabe – a treatise on the subject by Geoffrey Chaucer was the standard reference work throughout the middle ages. The exquisite astronomical data collected by the Dane Tycho Brahe (used partly for drawing up those horoscopes for Rudolf II) was essential to the discoveries of his protege, Kepler.

Boxer is understandably nervous about how his book will be received by his peers. “Invoking the rallying cry of science for a book about astrology, the arch-pseudoscience, may come across as a little preposterous,” he writes.

So will it undermine his credibility as a hard-headed data analyst? “It is a worry, and I’m still worried about it!” he admits. But he adds: “If you’re interested in science and ideas, it always behoves us to recognise that we’re a part of a much longer tradition.”

Boxer became curious about astrology because “it occurred to me that it can be seen as the antecedent of modern data science. If astrology is garbage, how do we know? It seemed to me that a lot of these questions are data questions.”

Astrology proved amazingly resilient as science evolved. You might imagine it would have been dealt a sucker punch when Copernicus rearranged the heavens in the early 16th century by replacing the Earth with the sun at the centre of the cosmos, relegating our home to a mere planet. That idea remained much disputed until the early 17th century, but the observations and arguments put forward by the likes of Kepler and Galileo, and later Isaac Newton, helped to make the Copernican model generally accepted by the end of the century.