A good reason why astrology is not being taught as a credible discipline is that my student, Shawn Carlson, published a superb paper in 1985 (I was the scientific advisor on the paper) titled “A double-blind test of astrology.” It was published in Nature Magazine, Vol. 318, page 419–425. It was a superb and careful objective test of the fundamental thesis of astrology: that date and time of birth could be used to predict aspects of personality. The work got full support of the most prestigious astrologers in the United States (yes, there really are such people), until he published his results. The astrologers were surprised; they honestly believed that Carlson would vindicate their field. Carlson showed that the top astrologers could do no better than chance. On my recommendation, he did enough tests to be able to exclude the astrology hypothesis to better than a 98% confidence level.

I contributed the method for finding the top astrologers. You start with a group of 30 astrologers, and ask them which astrologers in the US are the best. Then you go to this new group and ask them. Repeat, repeat, until you get a group who are all referencing others in the same group. This method works very well for physicists, so I assumed it would work for astrologers. It turned out that over half of this group were not only practicing astrologers, but also had Ph.D.s in psychology.

(Incidentally, many astrologers really believe what they are doing, and have such extensive experience that they often offer excellent advice. There are charlatans, but none of the ones in our final group were such phonies.)

I also supported the work—we had to pay astrologers to make natal charts—out of my NSF grant from my Alan T. Waterman Award. I did check with the National Science Foundation to see if they would object, and they responded that I had complete freedom to spend that funding on whatever project I thought best. It was a high point for the NSF!

With this major publication in a major journal, astrology was completely discredited. Shawn was later awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship for this and other outstanding work he did.

This paper by itself was sufficient reason to eliminate astrology from the academic curriculum.