Is Indian Astrology a Farce?

I‘ve been blogging quite often these days. The reason behind all this is not my passion towards blogging or rationalistic ideology crap. The prima facie reason is that I am jobless, jobless to the core. So I am compelled to blog.

Since ‘campus placements’ is round the corner, we are supposed to fill in a registration form or a kinda resume- a crappy one. The registration has “supposedly” started (After coming to this “mighty” anna univ I am using this double quotes too often). I told this to my dad. On hearing this he told me that, I should fill the form in some auspicious time. In spite of his busy work schedule these days, he took pains to see my astrological details from the ‘panchangam’ and suggested me an auspicious date and time. I still doubt if I can complete the registration on that prescribed time (damn anna servers!).

Fine, I would like to justify the science behind astrology. As I often say, I seriously don’t know if all this is true (same old dialogue!). I feel that, the essence of astrology is the famous Newtonian law of masses which goes something like this- “Between two masses, there exists a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of distance between them”

As we know, astrology is basically a science which is concerned with the influence of heavenly bodies on us. The most important factor of determining one’s ‘jatakam’ is the place of birth and time of birth.

What mighty Indian astrologers might have done originally is, basically create a database, where they would have charted out the position of various heavenly bodies that are worth influencing planet earth, for thousands of years in precision up to seconds. For eg. On June 6, 2006 at 17:30:40 hours the planet x might be at this place, planet y might be at this place, object z would be in this place and so on and at what angular position they are with respect to each place in earth. That should have been the first task.

The second task would have been to apply the Newtonian law but not in the way Newton proposed it but perhaps in a much more complicated manner. I’ll tell you why. I’ll explain with a specific case. Assume that a man is born in a place at a given time. So there must be some force between his 1.6 odd kg mass and the various planets which would be at different positions. Obviously there must be some force exchange between bodies of different masses. What these great astrologers would have done is to precisely compute the various forces due to masses at different angular positions as a generalized case. We would falter at a simple mechanics problem from I.E. Irodov (the book from which IIT JEE physics questions were lifted, I donno about the current scenario) involving a few force distribution models. Come on, and then think of those great Vedic astrologers who would have had to factor in a large number of forces, compute the resultant force and then finally computing the table. That is the table which we use even today. What astrology software today does is to get the date and place of birth and compute the ‘jatakam’ based on that table. No one is quite sure as to how that table was created by ancient Hindu astrologers even now. That remains a mystery. (Please don’t confuse yourselves with the conventionally used one, but I mean the one that relates what would happen if I am born in this place and time, I just don’t want to go into the intricacies for the sake of simplicity. For the time being assume it to be a table.)

One might very well ask, “I was born in the same hospital as Bill Gates was born and at the same time. But I am no where close to him”. So what can be the solution? Here is where the theory stutters. But lemme try explaining this phenomenon.

Let us take Mr. X to have born at some place. The forces would influence his motion, lifestyle in such a way that he would move to another place when he is 5 years old, again completely different planetary positions and again his lifestyle changes. So what happens is that progressively, the resultant force changes, and so his lifestyle changes but all that change in motion would have been influenced by the previous planetary positions. When his son or daughter is born, obviously their astrological map is influenced by his astrological map and hence we can conclude that even if two people are born in the same place and time, their life needn’t be the same and this chain continues across generations. What astrology broadly does is to generalize the case. The thing goes like the famous Fibonacci sequence where in every term is the sum of previous two terms. Astrology is very much similar. Every move of us is influenced by the previous move, akin to the manner we compute the nth Fibonacci number using the first term.

When, astrologers tabulated their calculation, probably the population was very small. So the probability that many children were born at the same time at a given place would have been very less, ergo the success. But now, since there is a huge population explosion, I feel that the table should be updated factoring in some more aspects to enhance the accuracy. But the hard reality is that we can’t even figure out how the table was created, so damn fools we are compared to the greats, there is no question of enhancement. I’ll tell you precisely where the problem lies. We know that planets are in continuous motion at a great speed and jus think how fast the resultant force and its angular position would change and it is really elusive to think of this as a problem to be solved in physics.

So what I am trying to say is that astrology is one of the most elusive branches of physics and not something to be mocked at by the “so called rational” fools. If they can, they should try to understand the physics behind it or rather shut the fuck up instead of mocking astrology.

All this is purely my imagination. I am not saying that I’m right but this is how I convince myself when I think “Is astrology really a farce?” This is just 1/nth of what astrology is and how it would be like. I have never delved into the aspect of what kind of force is that and by what property does it influence one’s actions. I’d definitely update this post with more inputs and ponderings.

Every aspect of this world is driven by Science. If something is beyond the scientific explanation, then the realty is that you are scientifically backward.
Long live Metaphysics.