This is a hoax forged 5 years after Einstein passed away and it was published in German in the 1960 Huters astrologischer Kalender. From there tranlated into French and later into English.

Einstein said in printing in 1951 that astrology was the INNER ENNEMY!!! of Kepler.

For the whole story of my search, see my paper published in the Skeptical Inquirer magazine of Nov.-Dec. 2007 available at:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-170731922.html

The same applies to the Newton-Halley dialogue not on astrology by on religion. You can find it in a biography of Newton by David Brewster publishe in the 1830s.

And the one by Kepler: ”20 years…” was forged from an actual sentence by him which condemns at the end the whole business of astrology. It can be found in his Harmony of the World, Aiton et al.

Best regards.

Denis Hamel

Well actually you do. Otherwise you need to build a well-constructed lineage from other events that have been done with experiment and produce, what is only a theory, about what will happen. Unless you don’t want to live in the scientific world as it’s currently defined. So one could conclude that you aren’t capable of using logic or scientific theory, making you a poor source for conclusions. Many mistakes in science have been made by projecting “common sense” of the times instead of using the scientific method.

Astrology is based on a division of 12 and various archtypes for each of them. The planets are attached to the archtypes, but they AREN’T them. So if one comes or goes, it doesn’t effect the underlying process. (I represent red with an apple. I destroy all apples. Red doesn’t go away. Now I use fire ants instead.) Archtypes isn’t really the right word for it, but the idea is that Pluto’s reassigment doesn’t do much but require an change back to using Mars as the substitute in the same way Mars was used before Pluto was discovered.

Does astrology work? Some studies say no, some say yes. So that’s not help unless one does a full scientific methodology peer review of the various studies. Newspaper quotes are meaningless since they are so totally superficial to how it’s done, and don’t say anything about astrology.

And does astrology work by directly predicting and describing – or is a place where people’s perceptive abilities come through (both normal perceptive & unusually perceptive)?

Personally I think it’s often more useful as a way for a particularly perceptive person to pull in ideas and describe them to a client. However, I have also had a few experiences that were eere. I certainly am not going to rule in, nor rule out an entire long lasting process, just because it’s unconventional. I’d need to do the heavy research myself. I won’t rule it in – or out. Making you laughter at it, very 8-grade ribbing sounding.

One of those eere experiences… I had a reading done by a woman my sister knew vaguely for a month. I’d had a series of unusual experiences that were knocking me off my feet in quick succession and had never had something like this in my life before. I didn’t tell her anything about it, nor had my sister. Yet she described a process as transient and shocking, knock me off my feet, in quick succession events and had the start of it right. (The ending seems right to but I didn’t pay close attention at the time.) That felt good and was interesting. But not much I could make of it.

However as she was putting away her books I asked her about a particular date. She could have assumed it was good or bad, but that’s all she had to go on. Looking down at the books, she saw on that date an accident, and death for me. Then looked up at me puzzled and said, “but your not dead” and looked down and said, oh, a friendship saved you. It was all done very quickly and without looking at me beyond the glance.

I’d asked about that day because I’d been hit by a car and thrown to the ground while walking along with a friend in a mall parking lot after hours in winter in upstate NY. We both passed out. She woke up, but I didn’t and would have likely frozen to death. She shook me awake and got us to the dorm & from there we were taken to the hospital. I was so out of it from the hit to my head that I tried to jump out of the car driving us to the dorm & the concussion lasted close to a year. I woke up the next morning in the hospital and thought that she’d saved my life. Afterward, I aways held in that way in my thoughts – whether that was true or not. So, her prediction was “vague”, however, it was also eeriely specific and accurate.

(FYI, my friend and I weren’t idiots. The movie ended. The bus was on the other side of the mall. The security refused to let us walk through the mall and insisted we leave and go through the parking lot. We were the only ones we needed to do. It turned out that drunk drivers often drove throught that parking lot from the bars to the neighborhoods on the other side.)

I called the woman a year later for a reading, this time over the phone. None of it was particularly “on” or interesting. Maybe a little click, but it didn’t have the intense “clicking” sense of the prior year.

There is much we don’t know about our world. It’s best not to mock something, just because it’s different, or doesn’t seem like it would make sense. Wait until you’ve experimented with it and explored it. As someone earlier said.

But test we can, and it’s come up short, including tests made up by astrologers themselves. If you can think of a better test, then by all means, let’s hear it.

Tests like these being cited as “proof” of the supposed invalidity of astrology is like saying CPR is a bad idea because folk who aren’t trained in its application end up injuring or killing the people they try to save.

The tests themselves are invalid—they do not measure what they claim to measure, pure and simple.

The fact of the matter is, astrology is not a tool of prediction, but of insight. It’s not a case of “a therefore b”; it’s a case of “these archetypes and relationships are more strongly emphasized than these others”. It’s a matter of associations, influences, symbolism. Astrology does not predict, it illustrates, illuminates.

No, you don’t have to drop an anvil on your foot to know it will break your bones. But comparing that to astrology-or tea leaf reading for that matter-is like comparing apples and communication satellites. Apples and oranges just ain’t in it. Heck, comparing astrology to tea leaves is just as invalid. Tea leaves are a method of scrying, more like unto fire or crystal gazing than astrology.

No, you don’t have to drop an anvil on your foot to know it will break your bones. But knowing this fact does not tell you everything there is to know about gravitation and osteopathy.