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.
