A Scheme Of Heaven: Astrology And The Birth Of Science

Author: Alexander Boxer

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General Fields

  • : $39.99 AUD
  • : 9781781259634
  • : Profile Books Limited
  • : Profile Books Ltd
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  • : 0.682
  • : December 2019
  • : ---length:- '23.4'width:- '15.3'units:- Centimeters
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  • : Alexander Boxer
  • : Hardback
  • : 2002
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  • : English
  • : 133.509
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  • : 320
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Barcode 9781781259634
9781781259634

Description

Despite a resurgence in popularity, horoscopes are generally considered to be pseudoscience today - but they were once a cutting-edge scientific tool. In this ingenious work of history, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines a treasure trove of esoteric classical sources to expose the deep imaginative framework by which - for millennia - we made sense of our fates. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world's most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained by some of history's most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler. A Scheme of Heaven explores the wonderful subtleties of astrological ideas. Telling the stories of their inventors and most influential exponents, Boxer puts them through their paces using modern data sets - finding that the methods of today's scientists are often uncomfortably close to those of astrology's ancient sages.