13th Zodiac sign
A01=Alexander Boxer
astronomy
Author_Alexander Boxer
Babylonian Empire
Category=PDX
Category=PGS
Category=PGT
Category=VXFA
classics
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eq_mind-body-spirit
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
history
in Retrograde
Is Astrology science
Lunar cycles
philosophy
science
Szygzy
Truth in Horoscopes
Vedic Astrology
Western Astrology
What's my star sign
Product details
- ISBN 9781781259641
- Weight: 240g
- Dimensions: 128 x 196mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jan 2021
- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Despite a resurgence in popularity, horoscopes are generally considered to be pseudoscience today - but they were once a cutting-edge scientific tool. In this ingenious work of history, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines a treasure trove of esoteric classical sources to expose the deep imaginative framework by which - for millennia - we made sense of our fates. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world's most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained by some of history's most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler.
A Scheme of Heaven explores the wonderful subtleties of astrological ideas. Telling the stories of their inventors and most influential exponents, Boxer puts them through their paces using modern data sets - finding that the methods of today's scientists are often uncomfortably close to those of astrology's ancient sages.
Alexander Boxer has a doctorate in physics from MIT, a master's degree in the History of Science from Oxford and a bachelors in Classical Language from Yale. His technical research has appeared in journals such as Nature Physics. In his spare time, he is an active member of Atlas Obscura as a D.C.-based 'field agent'.
