Description

'A delightful and utterly fascinating work of intellectual history.' Joshua Foer author of Moonwalking with Einstein 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.

A Scheme of Heaven: Astrology and the Birth of Science

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Hardback by Alexander Boxer

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'A delightful and utterly fascinating work of intellectual history.' Joshua Foer author of Moonwalking with Einstein Despite a resurgence in... Read more

    Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
    Publication Date: 09/01/2020
    ISBN13: 9781781259634, 978-1781259634
    ISBN10: 1781259631

    Number of Pages: 336

    Non Fiction , Mathematics & Science , Education

    Description

    'A delightful and utterly fascinating work of intellectual history.' Joshua Foer author of Moonwalking with Einstein 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.

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