How astrology paved the way for predictive analytics

Reported today on The Guardian

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How astrology paved the way for predictive analytics

How astrology paved the way for predictive analytics

Astrology has influenced science for millennia, argues a new book – and it endures in algorithmic data modelling

If you type "Why are millennials" into Google, the top result completes the question with "obsessed with astrology". Never mind the answer; the question alone is likely to incite exasperation among scientists, most of whom would condemn astrology as pseudoscience at its most fatuous and infuriating. Astrology may have long been debunked – there is no reason to suppose that our fate is written in the stars – but it still endures, endorsed by countless trashy magazines and newspapers (and some supposedly serious ones), feeding off our own, self-absorbed vanity.

But the truth, however annoying, is that astrology played an important role in the history of science. Many of today's scientists might be embarrassed to acknowledge, for example, that the 17th-century German mathematician Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, also cast horoscopes for his boss, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.

A new book by American data scientist Alexander Boxer, who has a doctorate in physics, aims to shift that view. A Scheme of Heaven: Astrology and the Birth of Science explores how astrology was a regular part of what was then called natural philosophy, at least until the time of the so-called scientific revolution in the 17th century that Kepler and Galileo heralded.

Boxer explains how a belief in the "astral influences" of the celestial bodies – the stars, constellations and planets – on events and people on Earth had motivated careful studies of the night sky since ancient times. The extraordin

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