> As for the truth of astrology - yes, according to
>quantum theory, the stars not only could but *do*
>influence our lives. But since leading scientists
>are *still* struggling to figure out exactly what
>the heck quantum means, and how it works, I don't
>believe that anyone who fully understands quantum
>relations is working as a horoscope editor for a
>newspaper. Which means that quantum causality can
>be effectively disregarded as a source of "proof"
>for astrology, since there is no one involved who
>is capable of employing it. Anyone who can prove
>me wrong, please do so.

I'm not going to prove you wrong, because I'd be willing to bet your statement is true. But what I *am* going to say is that the whole argument is specious anyway.

It doesn't matter if something *can* be true or not. It surely seems probable that the full moon could have some sort of effect on full-term women causing them to go into labor. After all, we're something on the order of 80% water, and the moon causes the tides, right? But it's not at all necessary to test the moon's affect on pregnant women to find out whether or not more babies get born on the full moon than on other days. We don't have to put pregnant women in gravitometers to test the pull of the moon on their uterus or anything like that. All we have to do is test the prediction of the theory--namely, that more babies are born on the full moon than on other nights. And it happens that there are lots of statistics on stuff like this, since hospitals have kept pretty good birth records for about a hundred years now. And as it turns out, there is *no* correlation between the full moon and birth rates. Statistically, the same amount of babies are born on nights with full moons as on nights without full moons.

So it doesn't matter a whit that the moon *could* have an effect on us, the same way it doesn't matter a whit that the stars *could* have a similar effect on us. We don't have to test that to test the validity of astrology. All we have to do is do double-blind tests to see if people can reliably be matched up with their star charts. And, in test after test, it's been shown that you can't match a person up with "their" star chart at a rate any better than chance would dictate.

Too many people confuse possibility with probability, or a hypothesis with fact. You can sit all day and come up with ways the stars *might* effect our lives in the way astrology predicts, but in the end, your work is all for naught if astrology can't be show to be reliable. You can show how a pleistocene dinosaur *might* have survived into the modern age in Loch Ness, but without finding hard evidence for its existence (or the bloody creature itself) you have accomplished nothing.

-- Dave