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A scheme of heaven
Paperback
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- Book Synopsis
- 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.
- About The Author
- Alexander Boxer has a doctorate in physics from MIT, a master's degree in the History of Science from Oxford and a bachelors in Classical Language from Yale. His technical research has appeared in journals such as Nature Physics. He currently works as a senior scientist at a small technology company just outside of Washington, DC. In his spare time, he is an active member of Atlas Obscura as a D.C.-based 'field agent'.
- Product Details
-
- ISBN
- 9781781259641
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Profile Books, (07 January 2021)
- Number of Pages
- 336
- Weight
- 240 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 196 x 128 x 26 mm
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