Astrology and Science – the Position of Science

In making a point in a certain problem it is always best to start with somebody else's point of view in that problem and build on it. At least this is the case in scientific publications, where it is assumed that a certain point of view is already assimilated by the interested public, so that it is a sound basis to build upon. We adopt this approach, which is advantageous from every point of view. Thus, Mary Anne Lionel's three reasons for supporting Astrology [1], work for Science just as well. Only, we have to compress them a little bit, in order to make our argument more understandable.

In fact, those three reasons can all be combined in a single fundamental principle, which was the basis of Natural Philosophy even from the oldest times. This general principle says approximately that "the Nature is a whole". Now, the Nature is revealed first to our senses: touching, smelling, tasting, viewing and hearing. It is according to these senses that we created the concept of structure, so that nowadays we see sometimes asserted that "the Nature is a whole system": by this the Nature is supposed to have a structure. As the structure is revealed to our senses through "things", Mary Anne is perfectly entitled to assert, as a corollary of the general principle, that "everything is interconnected" and this is the basis of Astrology. However, at this moment the Science steps in: the "interconnection" as a concept was only made possible by Science, and the Science simplified the image of things so much that, for instance, today Mary Anne is forced to remind people that "stars are not simply dots in the sky". It is our contention that one can find the place of Astrology as a Science in what this oversimplification of the concept of "thing" left outside its real content.

In order to pave the way in illustrating this, let's analyze how the Modern Science started. We understand by this the Science emerging after Newton. One can safely say that its basis is our sense of touching. Indeed, based on this sense we created the concept of force, and the force was brought by Newton to explain the harmony of the "Nature as a whole…system". Let's expound on this history a little bit, because it is both very interesting, instructive and, besides, shows what actually the fundamental of positive Science is.

At the time when Newton applied himself for explaining the Nature as a system, the image of this was the Copernicus' World System: the Sun placed in the center of the World with the planets revolving around it, and the fixed stars outside the realm of the planets. Newton found that a force acting perpetually on a planet and directed always towards the Sun would be able to explain this system. He deduced this by analogy with our earthly experience. Why force in explaining the World? Let's just say that it is what the Man fears and reveres most, and therefore should be the ground of everything.

The human knowledge did contain facts about the behavior of a stone tied up to a rope since times immemorial. Perhaps the most notorious recorded event related to such facts is that when David killed Goliath with a sling shot (1Samuel 17:48-51). This incident shows that the Man was able to skillfully use the sling even from old times. As a matter of fact it is known that ancient armies had specialized units of sling shooters. Thus, it shouldn't come as unnatural that Newton was able to think about the simple experiment with a stone tied up to a stretch of rope and rotated horizontally over the head by hand.

No question then, in this experiment the hand feels a force: therefore a force exists pulling the stone away from the hand; this is the centrifugal force. This fact can even be tested by anybody on a daily basis. Now, as the common experience shows, we can feel the centrifugal force only because the hand has to oppose a force in order to keep the stone rotating. In general, whenever a force acts along a direction, there is counterforce acting along the same direction but oppositely. Thus one can infer that there is a force acting centripetally, i.e. towards the center of motion, on the stone and opposing to the one we feel at the hand when the stone rotates.

One of the main strokes of Newton's genius was in using this common fact in the analogy we want to talk about: the planets of the Copernican system of the World travel around the Sun in closed circular orbits, exactly like our stone in a rope. The two situations are indeed completely analogous, but only from a geometrical point of view. The main difference is a physical one: the rope is missing in the case of planets. However in the case of a sling the existence of rope is instrumental, inasmuch as it guaranties the existence of the centripetal force as opposed to centrifugal force. This turns out to be a real deficiency, because we can think of a centrifugal force acting upon planets, because they are revolving around the Sun. By analogy, we would be induced to think of a centripetal force opposed to the centrifugal one. But can we? Can we think of a force acting through space in the opposite sense along the direction Sun-Planet, without any material agent to connect them?

This fact was indeed in the days of Newton, as it is in fact nowadays, beyond the reaches of the experience up to date. And thus it may appear as noteworthy to anyone that Newton had to dedicate a special section to describing the centripetal forces. This is the Section II from the first book of Principia unambiguously entitled "Of the Invention of Centripetal Forces." [2]. It was indeed an invention, and what invention! Newton describes it with clarity in every detail, starting with the proposition that under any central action the motion cannot be but plane motion, respecting the second of Kepler's Laws about the motion of the planets, and then explaining all the observational facts – and many others for that matter – just by assuming the action of the Sun upon planets.

This is, one of the crucial moments of our knowledge when the genius of Newton stepped in and delivered a scientific argument that radically changed our thinking forever. Not unexpectedly, it is the most criticized moments of Newton's creation. Still appealing to experience, Newton reshaped it by transforming a common fact, which apparently had nothing to do with the force, into the effect of a force.

First, we should say that it was long realized, even before Newton, that there are indeed apparent forces that don't act through the intervention of a material agent, and these are even noticeable on a daily basis: the action of magnets, electricity and, finally, the daily weight of earthly bodies. The moment of analogy between magnetism for instance and the fall of bodies is usually associated with the known anecdote of the falling apple, whereby Newton realized that an essential attribute of a force is not so much the material agent that might happen to be necessary in order to accomplish its effect (rope, rod and such), as it is actually the fact that the force is a cause of motion. The fall of an apple is completely equivalent with the motion of a magnet in the magnetic field of another magnet. In short, the fall of an apple is a motion and should be caused by a force acting on the apple.

Then the same cause that makes an apple fall is undoubtedly the cause that keeps the Moon around the Earth and the planets around the Sun. This fact can be seen by imagining, as Newton did, a projectile shot horizontally from places at different altitudes, or at the same altitude with different speeds. If such a missile has enough initial speed, it can engage along a closed circumterrestrial trajectory, a full circle, just like the Moon. This, we may imagine, is indeed the situation of the Moon, minus the initial shooting moment. And if this is the case, then we can push our imagination a little further to think of the Sun and planets in just about the same terms. And so it was!

Now, because in a round trajectory the body must, according to our experience, undergo centrifugal forces, the planets as well as the Moon must experience a centrifugal force. However, because the planets and the Moon are there forever, completing periodically their cycles, there should be a force upon them that acts oppositely to the centrifugal force of the planets, otherwise they would be free to wander in space. This is the force of gravitation, the very same which, acting upon apple, makes it fall. Now, if the origin of this force is in the Sun, or Earth, as the case occurs, apparently it does not require a material agent to help accomplishing its effect. No such agent can indeed be noticed by any one of our senses between Sun and Earth or between Earth and Moon. The force, as well as its cause, can only be inferred as existing from the geometrical aspect of the motion of the planets and of the Moon in the way just shown, i.e. by analogy.

One can see that the construction of this picture demands, even today, a significant amount of imagination which, given the times when he lived and worked, makes indeed Newton outstanding among geniuses, to say nothing of laymen. It is this sort of imagination that Ernst Mach for instance describes and analyzes to Newton [3]. Even though outstanding by itself, it represents only the tip of the iceberg! For, the dangerous part of imagination is deep down and obscured by the very same logical steps as presented in the short scenario just described.

Our point here is that the imagination played an essential role in the foundation of the modern Science, in its development, and continues to play an essential role in the development of Science today. When the light – the 'thing" revealed by the sense of seeing – came to be scientifically described, the imagination played, again, an even more important role than it played to Newton. We tried to analyze all these issues in a recently published book [4], where details of scientific and philosophical nature can be found.

Here we just want to pinpoint the position of Science as revealed from the perspective of its fundamentals. Like Astrology, it plainly uses imagination. However the imagination is used by Science in order to explain what is revealed by our senses with the help of what is revealed by our senses. There is no reason to think that there should be nothing beyond our senses, which can be explained with what is revealed to our senses. This is what the contemporary Science calls for, more and more insistently. By the very same token, rationally this is the place where the Astrology comes in. But all of a sudden we can realize that it claims an exactly opposite task: to explain what comes to our senses by what is beyond them, which seems to be a product of the pure imagination, any way we look at it. The question is: how? Let's have faith! As Hamlet once said "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". For the philosophy is, at times, very superficial!

References:

[1] Mary Anne Lionel, Does Moon Really Influences Hair Growth? this site
[2] Isaac Newton, The Principia, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York 1995
[3] Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago 1902
[4] Nicolae Mazilu, Science as a Sin, published at lulu.com