So again, Geoffrey Dean et al (Nias, Mather, Smit, with contributions from Heukelom and Kelly) have unleashed their cocktail of unoriginal and divisive opinion on an un-expectant world. Perhaps this time they will have found something in their chosen specialised subject, astrology. Alas, no,  they have succeeded in finding nothing despite reviewing 1000 experiments and so their tome must continue to serve as a guidebook for guerrilla skeptics, unimaginative materialist authors and online astronomy educators. All of the people Rob Hand notes to be:

“…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.”

Some context here, 1000 experiments sounds like a lot. It’s not. It’s a pitiful few considering the 366 years since astrology was expelled from academia. Physics currently gets about 120 billion hours of research per century (800,000 physicists at any time * 1500 hours research per year * 100 years). If astrology had this kind of facility, we would have a developed subject by now.  If each of the 1000 experiments in the book had taken somewhere near the same time as my own (none did), but let’s say they spent 25,000 hours on each experiment, the total research time would be just 25,000,000 hours. That’s 0.02% of the total hours spent on physics research. As only one, perhaps two of the experiments exceeded 25,000 hours you can see my point. No research = no development. No development = no progress. No progress = same mistakes are made over and over again. Same mistakes = Easy job for Geoffrey Dean et al.

As it stands the multi-century lack of patronage, funding, and the subsequent lack of actual researchers in this space has assured no progress. William Lilly could easily get a job as an astrologer today (and he wouldn’t actually be required to learn anything about Uranus, Neptune or Pluto). Dean et al, for 99% of their book are simply recording the ongoing effects of academic abandonment. If medicine had been abandoned by academia for hundreds of years, they could have written about how it ‘doesn’t really work’. If you think this is absurd, think back, medicine was abandoned by academia in the West for over a thousand years, more precisely from the death of Hypatia in 415CE to about 1796CE. Astrology’s rejection from academia was in contrast to the acceptance of medicine. Both subjects looked almost the same in 1666.

You could say that both medicine and astrology were attached to a more tangible, or ‘easy to validate’ subject, and that astrology – the psychology++ of its day – was quite easy to wrest from astronomy, its de facto technical partner since prehistoric times. Astrology was effectively de-patronized and isolated from the developing scientific academies. But medicine, connected in the same tangible way to anatomy, was harder to separate. Anatomy, more particularly surgery, was a comparatively advanced subject in 1666, general medicine (the non-surgical part of anatomical study) was not. Bloodletting, herbal remedies and the four humours as well as astrological guidance and prayer were the core of 17th Century medicine. Surgery was a slightly more precise science. 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. Science had to wait a long time for advances in medicine. Medicine developed slowly despite it not being declared pseudoscience and its subsequent access to funding.  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.

As soon as you get a single result you get funding, if you get funding you get researchers, if you get enough funding you get talented researchers, if you get talented researchers you get progress. Dean et al try to pretend that astrology has researchers. It simply doesn’t and they’re not helping us get them.

My experiments are a departure from what you might describe as traditional research. I maintain that the results of my experiments actually explain why we have not got results from most of the other experiments in astrological research history. This is a very good reason to try to debunk my findings, if Dean et al don’t debunk me, then all of their other endeavours are practically invalidated. If I say ‘by the way the reason you have not got extraordinary positive results (mine have extraordinarily high significance) from every experiment in the past is because all researchers have been viewing the horoscope as fixed and static, when in fact it moves’, it rather invalidates all of their crucial criticisms and demonstrates academic abandonment to be the cause of the mistake that made the materialist/rationalists of the world believe astrology to be a pseudoscience. In this instance the carefully constructed house of straw upon which almost all ideas about pseudoscience are constructed, starts to shake visibly.

The really annoying fact here is that Dean et al actually know that my experiments were successful. I shared, in good faith, my data which they perused for a year and then published whatever they could to try to cast doubt on it. But not before they had suggested to me a number of scenarios so bizarre and far-fetched that, if true, I would have been eligible for a Nobel Prize. They didn’t appear to understand the irony. Here’s Dean nominating me for a Nobel Prize: