'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.
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A Scheme of Heaven 9781781259634 Hardback
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- Year Published:
- 2020
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Format:
- Hardback
- ISBN:
- 9781781259634
- Number of Pages:
- 336
- Publication Date:
- 09/01/2020
- Publisher:
- Profile Books Ltd
- Authors:
- Boxer, Alexander
- Illustrations Note:
- 16 pages full colour plates
- Imprint:
- Profile Books Ltd
- Place of Publication:
- London
- SKU:
- 9781781259634