Showing posts with label Newton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Newton. Show all posts

Monday, July 23, 2007

"I'm into Astronomy, not Astrology"



So Bob how long have you been into Astrology, hmm let me think, ah, never. It's a question I've been asked many times before. It's like your talking to someone about the latest Star Wars movie and they say, oh, your a trekkie, for one it's trekker, and another, Star Wars and Star Trek are 2 different everythings, once and for all people, Darth Vader and Captain Kirk never fought together in any movie or tv series, Vader fought Jedi knights, Kirk, hung around with a lot of women, and fought Klingons, ..........anyhoo, I digress.

Back on topic, somewhere between 4,000 and 2,000 B.C. barbarism gave way to communal living and the development of agriculture became a priority, with recognition and prediction of the movement of the heavenly bodies,(seasons), man could plan when and where to plant and build dikes and canals to store water, in short, the heavenly bodies and their goings on in space, directly effected events on Earth (birth of Astronomy), It was only a small leap of faith to then assume that the events and movements of the heavenly bodies effected Earths people,(birth of Astrology). Astrology and Astronomy were basically indistinguishable for thousands of years up and until the time of, Sir Issac Newton. With his "Newton's Principia" Newton was first to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies in precise mathematical form which started the modern era of Astronomy. Even though I'm not into it I can appreciate the fact that Astrology influenced the birth of many sciences such as, mathematics, chemistry and biology. Ancients called anything falling from or seen in the sky, with the exception of the stars, moon, sun and five planets, "meteors" , first there was "aerial meteors," consisting mainly of winds and clouds, then there was "aqueous meteors" consisting of rain, fog, dew and snow, finally there was the "luminous meteors", consisting of , rainbows, sundogs and moondogs, they eventually grouped everything together to become what we know today as meteorology. I still read my horoscope every once and awhile to see if it even remotely resembles my situation. Statements such as "you will come into some money this week", well I am always finding pennies that my boss throws away in the trash, actually ever since he caught me going through the garbage he has started putting them in my mailbox. To sum it up, Astronomy is discovering and understanding our universe, Astrology is using the universe to predict the future so as to control our own destiny.