Geoffrey Dean et al. (Nias, Mather, Smit, with contributions from Heukelom and Kelly) publication revisits their characteristic blend of unoriginal and divisive scepticism toward astrology. Despite their review of over 1,000 experiments, they present no substantive discoveries. Instead, this tome must continue to serve as a guidebook for self-styled “guerrilla sceptics,” unimaginative materialist authors, and online astronomy educators -an audience described by Rob Hand as:

“…second-rate physicist-astronomers and people like that who are incompetent at doing what they are supposed to be doing, so they have at us instead of doing their own proper work! Half-baked hacks in their own fields. They are more interested in winning than in finding out the truth.” (Phillipson, 2024)
The ‘academic abandonment’ of astrology limits the Scope of Research

While 1,000 experiments might sound substantial, it is, in fact, a paltry amount given the 358 years since astrology was expelled from academia. For comparison, physics receives approximately 120 billion hours of research per century, a consequence of the patronage and institutional support that astrology lacks. If astrology had access to similar resources, it would undoubtedly be a far more developed field today.
Even if each of the 1,000 experiments took as long as my own, which is highly unlikely, 25,000 hours per experiment, the total research time for these 1,000 experiments would amount to just 25 million hours—only 0.02% of the time invested in physics research. Most of the studies in Dean et al.’s collection fall far short of this benchmark. The inevitable result is a stagnation of the field, where the same methodological errors are repeated, enabling Dean and his collaborators to easily critique the lack of progress without addressing the root cause: the academic abandonment of astrology.

Two diverging histories: Astrology and Medicine
Astrology’s academic rejection mirrors a historical pattern seen in medicine. For over a thousand years, from the death of Hypatia in 415 CE to the advent of vaccination in 1796 CE, western medicine was left to stagnate. During the 17th century, medicine relied on bloodletting, herbal remedies, the four humours and prayer—much like astrology, it lacked empirical rigour. However, medicine benefited from its association with anatomy, a tangible and technical field, which eventually allowed it to re-enter academia and advance.

Samuel Pepys was operated on successfully to remove a bladder stone ‘the size of a tennis ball’ in 1658, yet he can be found reporting on medical bloodletting 8 years later by the same surgeon.

It was only Edward Jenner’s discovery (or rediscovery) of vaccination that placed it on an upward trajectory and within a century we had anaesthetics and germ theory. The century that followed brought antiseptics, antibiotics, transplantation and gene therapy. As soon as we had germ theory, bloodletting ceased.
Astrology, by contrast, was severed from its technical counterpart since prehistoric times, astronomy, and left isolated without institutional support. Dean et al.’s critiques of astrology could easily be applied to medicine during its pre-academic revival. If medicine had been similarly dismissed, critics would also have had ample evidence to argue that it “doesn’t work.” Yet, as history shows, funding, resources and skilled researchers can transform even the most stagnant disciplines. Dean et al try to pretend that astrology has researchers to justify their dismissal of astrology.

A Departure from Traditional Research
My experiments mark a significant departure from traditional approaches to astrological research. I contend that the results of my studies shed light on why many previous experiments in this field have failed to yield extraordinary outcomes. This presents an excellent opportunity for critics to debunk my findings, as their validity challenges the entire foundation of prior astrological research—and by extension, much of the sceptical critique.

Their inability to debunk my findings would render many of their efforts invalid. In essence, their critiques crumble when juxtaposed with a model of astrology that accounts for dynamism. This revelation exposes a long-standing error, rooted in what I term “academic abandonment,” that allowed materialist and rationalist thinkers to prematurely dismiss astrology as pseudoscience. With this, the carefully constructed “house of straw” supporting claims of pseudoscience begins to visibly collapse.

The Critics Know My Results Were Successful
What’s particularly frustrating is that Dean et al. are fully aware of the success of my experiments. In good faith, I shared my data with them, which they reviewed over the course of a year. Rather than engaging constructively with the findings, they published selectively, aiming to cast doubt. Before doing so, however, they proposed several speculative and far-fetched scenarios to explain my results—scenarios so improbable that, were they true, I would indeed qualify for a Nobel Prize as Dean suggested: