Alexander Boxer | Scheme of Heaven: Astrology and the Birth of Science
Alexander Boxer | Scheme of Heaven: Astrology and the Birth of Science
An illuminating look at the surprising history and science of astrology, civilization’s first system of algorithms, from Babylon to the present day.
Humans are pattern-matching creatures, and astrology is our grandest pattern-matching game. In this refreshing work of history and analysis, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines classical texts on astrology to expose its underlying scientific and mathematical framework. 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,” or horoscope, is recognized as pseudoscience today, but was once considered a cutting-edge scientific tool. Not only does Boxer trace different applications of horoscopes back to their origins, he also puts them to the test using modern data sets and statistical science, arguing that today’s data scientists do work similar to astrologers of yore.
At once critical, rigorous, and far-ranging, A Scheme of Heaven recontextualizes astrology as a vast, technological project—spanning continents and centuries—that foreshadowed our data-driven world today.
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