Astronomers know that. The public doesn’t care.
Astronomers won’t tell you if your ex will come back with a bag of casino chips, therefore astrologers are better.
I think that many scientific discoveries, inventions and developments in the West occurred under the mantle (veil) of astrology. I am not familiar of how astronomy was practiced in ancient East and I can’t tell if Go was developped under that mantle.
The public also doesn’t care about go. I don’t care about the public. Do you?
Astronomy is based on scientific principles. Astrology is based on… manipulation? It is true that some funders of astronomy were more interested in astrology, but that doesn’t mean that the line between the fields was fuzzy.
Astronomy and astrology are about as different as it gets. Nothing changes this fact, especially not how the masses may think of them.
They are different because one is science and the other is telemarketing.
However, in the past they were practiced by the same person (because of several reasons, first being their survival, second being money) and in our days astronomers do their work happily while astrologers use astronomy to legitimize their trade. It is in the very recent centuries that people got allowed to look at astronomy and not get decapitated. Therefore, I insist the line is fuzzy because people didn’t have enough time to disambiguate.
I am not saying that astrology is a science, I am saying astronomy was not allowed to function as astronomy for a long long time.
Can you give an example of something that is hard to categorize as either astronomy or astrology?
It sounds like you are referring to Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time (1969) by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. That book and its theory were much ridiculed when it came out and for years afterward. I read it in the early 1970s and found it stimulating. It is very badly written, and some of its elements are dubious, but its main thrust—that the Greek myths encoded ancient astronomical knowledge—is a lot more plausible today in view of the enormous advance in our knowledge of ancient astronomy over the last 50 years.
In addition, it was either Socrates (I think) or Plutarch who said that there were a few old people in his youth (or maybe he referred to the time of his father; I don’t remember) who new the meaning of the myths, but they were all dead, and no one was left who knew the meaning.
One thing only: the sales talk.
Astrologers must be fluent in astronomy terminology and must be aware of basic principles, planets, patterns and other scientific notions, so that they can present the customer with a “map”. The customer generally thinks that the astrologer is an astronomer who likes making calendars.
Just because the customer can’t see the difference between astronomy and astrology, doesn’t mean there is no (clear) difference.
I can agree that the line sadly may look fuzzy to some (many?) people. And I hope that those people will be able to see more clearly in the future.
Edit: Feels like I’m splitting hairs.
There is Astronomy and astronomy. I mean when science let us go on the moon I respect more as when they talk about curved universe and black holes. That part of astronomy feels more near with astrology.
Seems like an important disambiguation to me. It is connected to the question how we can know stuff. Science (and therefore astronomy) has sound methods to figure out stuff, astrology doesn’t.
Quite ironic, as I’m pretty sure that we would not be able to go to the moon without Einstein’s relativity theory, which introduced curved spacetime in the first place.
Well i am far to have any expertise in astronomy and my example may be bad choices. The relativity theory can have implication to the ability to go to the moon for sure but i dunno at all how realistic it is to figure far away universe and such.
I mean to me there are a full bunch of extrapolations and hypothesis more as established things at some distance from here, and it sounds more like a sweet poetry emaning and conform with what we are based as something solid.
Black holes have recently been measured (gravitational waves) and photographed. It’s not just extrapolations and hypothesis. It is sound science, hard to do but it is not that hard to understand the basic principles.
I dunno. I respect the science methodology and such and the research associated to it in the far cosmos with the tools we elaborate Although I keep being doubtful on the conclusions who are fitted to the very few we can see.
What do we have there? Little lights in the black. So yes you can look at them with a lot of focus, see the variations of intensity and colors. See how they dispatch. Zoom, a little bit. What more? Just a bunch of little lights to elaborate the world. A yes some radiations too that we can feel or measure (well not me but i can understand)
@Cchristina Is it even worth bringing up the issues related to progression and more generally how it all keeps changing all the time and therefore how poorly the popular astrological signs actually line up with anything, or is that just going to cause more confusion for everyone? (he says as he brings it up anyway)
If we should do (or fund) basic research and what kind of it is an interesting question to ask. It hasn’t much to do with astrology though.
This is the best part! The way people rely on Lyras, Dragons, Bears or the Bee Hummingbird because they are afraid. They cling to their cultures for almost everything but they willingly adopt star signs!
… … … … … … … … … … … …
As for the relation with Go or other board games, I see it happening like this:
-Hello Minister, sorry for interrupting your board game but I must know if you think this will be a good summer.
-No your excellence, the troops are starved and your commercial outlets are outsourced to foreigners and we need some aqueducts here and a few inns in that valley over there.
-Take his head for criticising me!
-No, no, wait, I mean the white stones on this board represent your ancestors by the star signs of the bear and the sacred oak tree and they show that if you create an eye in this spot representing our biggest city and a ladder in this spot representing our harshest mountain, we will have a good summer!
-Oh, okay. Take this gold and diamonds for your advice.
Jump to the next season:
-Hello Minister, I see you are hard at work divining God’s intentions on your Go Board.
(not even looking up or breaking the flow of his hand as he connects two groups)
-Yes, your excellence, the General and I have been hard at work divining what is to be done about that broken levee and the starving troops. The ancestors seem displeased with your lack of attention to the land, but there is good news.
-Please tell me now, before I have you executed!
-Do you see this connection I just made? That is sending the troops to fix the levee. Do you see this large area over here?
-Yes, but what does it mean?
-This is the wealth we will gain by building a barracks and then turning it into an inn once the levee has been repaired. At least, that is what Monkey Spirit says and I believe him as he is the closest to your ancestors…
(King nods, uncomprehendingly. The general makes a solid endgame move on the second line.)
-Very well…but keep divining. I don’t want to see you slacking off like you did last season, traveling around the countryside like you have nothing better to do!
(General and Minister bow deeply as the King departs in a huff)