Country | |
Publisher | |
ISBN | 9781781259634 |
Format | HardBound |
Language | English |
Year of Publication | 2020 |
Bib. Info | 16 p,234 x 153 (mm) |
Categories | History of science, Astronomy, space & time, Astronomical charts & atlases, Astrology, Popular astronomy & space |
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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.