Psychics

The use of the services of psychics in regard to personal problems or to wider issues of concern is a widespread feature of societies throughout the world. The concept of a psychic has been felt by some to be essentially anachronistic in a modern day world where scientific research and methodology had produced a valuable body of knowledge that provides the basis for activities and technology employed to better the quality of human life. In contrast to the mindset of a scientifically driven world the function of psychics has been consistently criticized by the advocates of scientifically based knowledge, who argue that rigorous statistical testing and the application of existing resources for information has never been able to prove reliably that psychics exist as a physical reality. Despite these critiques, belief in the existence of psychic powers have been found by studies to be common in highly industrialized and educated nations such as the United States, where unsympathetic observers expect people to form conclusions based on the judgments of science. The fact that many people do not while continuing to act in accordance with many other theories and practices suggested by the results of scientific research is a common subject for psychologists and sociologists attempting to understand the basic foundations for the operation of people’s functions of belief.

The categorization of powers of perception regarding private thoughts or the definitive knowledge of events still to unfold as being psychic is itself a result of the modern, scientifically based world. In previous epochs and cultures based on models other than the current form of the Western prototype concerned with scientific rigor and political liberty, the people known as psychics in industrialized societies performed other roles, such as that of a seer, oracle or shaman. Such individuals often held a highly respected role within a community. In the case of shamans, they often occupied a dominant position in a social group, and were counted on for the display of leadership and guidance in part through their psychic abilities. Cultures considered to be hewing to tribal models often showed this characteristic. In other cultures, people exhibiting psychic powers had more marginal roles which seldom accorded them the ability to graduate to leadership positions but might still provide them with a vital decision-making role in the times of crises, as is indicated in an episode of Herodotus’s Histories of Greek culture.

In the 19th century, traditionally based beliefs in individuals who would now be considered psychics were downgraded by the development of scientific methods for collecting information and arriving at conclusions, which also enabled a rapid rise in the rates of economic activity and technological innovation. The less pleasant aspects of living in a heavily industrialized society prompted new interest in older forms of knowledge, such as those based on the insights of psychics. This new expression of long held beliefs motivated scientific endeavor to turn its attention in the 20th century to people who were now referred to as psychics.

Astrology Sings

The use of astrology signs as a method for conducting intellectual inquiry is widely based throughout world cultures and has been found to be made a subject of belief quite consistently in vastly different populations. Astrology has existed as a system of methodology for predicting the future outcomes of event through much of history. It can be generally defined as a means for attaining knowledge about events on earth, whether related to human beings individually or collectively or in terms of the natural world, by studying the positions of heavenly bodies, such as stars, moons and other planets, in the sky. Though not generally included within modern day scientific culture and considered a pseudo-scientific system of thought, large numbers of people throughout the world continue to look at astrology signs for deriving guidance as to the day to day conduct of their lives. It can also boast a significant place in the course of human intellectual history, having influenced the early development of techniques and tools for conducting research in astronomy and thus driving the acquisition of human knowledge as to the conditions found elsewhere in the Solar System, Milky Way and universe. It was generally and widely considered an important component of the fields of science up to the period in expansion in intellectual inquiry and artistic endeavor in Western European history referred to as the Renaissance. During this period thinkers began to suspect that the studying of astrology signs did not provide a reliable guide as to the study of human history and personal psychology.

This development impelled the beginning of the trend for astrology and astronomy to be considered as separate realms of intellectual endeavor. Despite these changes in the intellectual currents around the studying of celestial bodies, experts in the field of science remain conscious of the part that the study of astrology played in encouraging increases in the rate of cultivation of scientific knowledge on the part of scientific communities in the Western world and have acknowledged that central figures in the development of modern day scientific methodologies such as Isaac Newton and the early astronomer Tyco Brahe were heavily motivated by a belief that paying careful attention to the movements of planets and stars as dictated by the tenets of astrology could yield useful and accurate results regarding the natural world. People interested in the progress of human inquiry into the conditions of the world and universe which surround us will most likely share the scientific community’s broad consensus that the study of astrology signs is without merit as a means for achieving a consistent scientific methodology but may also find a useful source of information as to the development of scientific and esoteric systems of thought by looking at how different cultures have interpreted and developed the use of astrology over time. Since astrology continues to exercise influence and power over many modern day practitioners and followers, understanding the perspective of such people, particularly if they happen to be loved ones or close friends, on the part of an individual proceeding from a more skeptical point of view can be positively affected by an understanding of the sources from which a belief in the use of astrology signs is derived.

Scholars of the field of astrology as it has been practiced throughout history point to three primary traditions in the development of the set of practices and beliefs which lie behind the modern day study of astrology signs. These three main strands are the Vedic tradition of Hindu astrology, Western astrology based out of Christian European society, and Chinese astrology, which overlap with each other and also differ in a number of ways. For instance, a comparison has been drawn by comparative analysis of the different branches of astrology between the Western model and the Hindu model, in that both derive their essential conception of what can comprise astrological signs from the creation of a system of horoscopes. These systems are based on the creation of astrological charts, known as horoscopes, which represent celestial bodies in relation to events occurring at a certain point. Though the European and Indian approaches to astrology concur in their essential reliance on a system based on the use of a zodiac chart, they differ in their conception of a zodiac that can yield relevant and useful results. The Western practice for understanding and interpreting astrology signs has been to use a zodiac that is seasonal, in comparison to which the Indian cosmological system consists of a “fixed” zodiac, which is fixed in the sense of being tied down to the original constellations which inspired the signs of the zodiac.
In Chinese culture, on the hand, the investigation of astrology signs proceeds from the creation of a system of astrology that is not based on the zodiac creating a division of the sky, but rather of a concept of the celestial equator. In this system of astrology, each one of the astrology signs can be connected to a method for understanding the division of a day as consisting of a set of twelve double hours, each one of which corresponds to an astrological sign. Likewise, each sign can also be connected in meaning to a month. From a more removed perspective, each year can be fitted within a cycle of time lasting for sixty years. This component of traditional Chinese astrological practice derives from an understanding of each zodiac sign as being related to a particular year. The belief in five basic elements of cosmology is then used to derive the number of sixty.

Though this system for interpreting astrology signs is usually referred to as Chinese, especially by general observers of the development of astrological concepts and of practitioners who derive their ideas and methods from the practices long in place in Western European and Indian culture, it is not limited in its original use to the area of China alone, but it also used as a system of astrology throughout nearby Asian countries. Some of these nations include Korea, Thailand, Japan and Vietnam, all of which have been shown to include portions of their populations which derive their astrological methods from a model similar in its ideas to the Chinese astrology system. Scholars who have studied the ways in which this way of understanding astrological concepts are not certain of when and how it was first created but believe that it can essentially be stated to be an example of a “Jupiterian” system for studying cosmology. In such a system, the primary yardstick comes from the motion of Jupiter around the sun, which takes 11.889 Earth years.

These systems were originally concocted at a time when the degree of development of technology and culture did not allow for great ease in and availability of travel and hence dictated that cultures only enjoyed limited degrees of contact with each other, which had the further effect of limiting their levels of understanding of and acquaintance with each other’s intellectual systems. Their methods for conducting astrology, as with other forms of knowledge, could take place only gradually or at certain historical junctures. With today’s increased rates of interaction between cultures, the way in which different systems of astrology have related to each other has varied, and in many aspects has been lop sided. For instance, the concepts set forth by the astrological practices of Indian and Chinese cultures have exerted a wide ranging effect on the Western practice of astrological investigation. In contrast to this phenomena, the methods and techniques of Western astrology are less well known in Asian cultures, which have shown themselves to be generally skeptical of the need to adopt new standards in astrological practice. In addition to cross cultural transmission of ideas, Western astrological concepts have also been developed in regards to allowing the citation of more sources for astrological knowledge, including the use of the original constellations or the relationship between the earth’s plates and the planet’s elliptical orbit.

Another component of the place of astrology within modern systems of intellectual inquiry comes from the attempts made to place it in the context of ideas developed through the scientific method. Such efforts approach the bodies of astrological systems of knowledge either in the hope of accounting for how to understand its hold and influence on people’s thoughts without at all subscribing to its claimed abilities of prediction, or of trying to find certain ways in which such astrological methods can be found to possess some limited degree of scientific validity. Though statistical analysis has shown that the predictions made through astrological methods are consistently accurate as to the events they attempt to address to no greater degree than if they were intentionally made at random, according to no system, the field of experimental psychology has nonetheless uncovered several causes for why people are inclined to subscribe to the practice. One such phenomena is the tendency to remember the accurate predictions given in a set more than the inaccurate ones, thus seeming to reveal astrology’s effectiveness.

Astronomy

The world of space astronomy has been captivated since late March 2010 by the announcement of data recovered by the Hubble Space Telescope. These findings in astronomy, based on photographs which were obtained through the telescope and then submitted to close analysis by experts in the field, have brought new insights into an important subject concerning the nature of the universe that has long been a crucial area for investigation by figures in the realm of astronomy. These announcements are said to be particularly groundbreaking for the pursuit of space astronomy as a scientific discipline in that the astronomers responsible for conducting the study and analyzing the information which it was primarily designed to produce were able to devise techniques for bringing in an array of information on a range of different objects for investigation and study that exceeded any research that has thus far been conducted in astronomy as a field. The data sets were available to the researchers on the space astronomy project to a tune of 557 separate images captured through the properties of the Hubble telescope, which contained as their contents photographic evidence on a number of galaxies exceeding 446,000. The photographs not only indicated a fact which has long been recognized in the area of astronomy, that of the nature of the universe to expand over time, but also definitively proved and provided further illuminating and specific information relating to the rate at which this phenomenon of the universe’s acceleration is occurring, which as has long been argued by experts in the field of space astronomy is said to be steadily undergoing a process of acceleration.

The knowledge that the universe is naturally given to expanding has long been in the possession of astronomy, and coincides with the inspiration for the Hubble Space Telescope, Edwin Hubble, a well-known astronomer whose fame as a practitioner of space astronomy influenced the developers of the Hubble Space Telescope to name the device for them. In 1929 he uncovered evidence of the universe’s expansion relating to the analysis of information on the speeds of various galaxies throughout the universe. This theory received a much-belated supplement many decades later, with the 1998 announcement in astronomy that research work had uncovered the first evidence that the rate at which the universe’s expansion was occurring was undergoing an increase. It received support from the field of space astronomy in part due to it’s coinciding with the Einstein theory of general relativity, which required expansion of such kinds to take place according to its projected calculations.

This most recent study using the Hubble Space Telescope to study the expansion of the universe has been able to enjoy the significant impact on the academic realm of astronomy in large part due to its utilization of a new tool and area of understanding, that of the concept of the effect of “weak gravitational lensing” that occurs when galaxies are very far away from each other and thereby become distorted, giving more insight on the phenomenon.