On science, eclipses and the cosmic miracle that led me to astrology
Around 10 years ago, I had a realisation that led me to question my entire worldview, which up till then was what I suppose you’d describe as “atheist-materialist”. It concerned total solar eclipses. These spectacular cosmic light shows are only possible in their full glory because the two major celestial objects in our skies both appear to be almost precisely the same size and shape from our vantage point on Earth.
It dawned on me that this was an incredibly unlikely state of affairs. Make the Moon larger or move it closer to Earth and eclipses just wouldn’t be the same. We’d still experience the darkening of the sky, but lose that stunning “ring of fire” effect, the solar plasma flaming around the lunar void. And they’d happen more regularly—perhaps so regularly as to make them unremarkable. On the other hand, make the Moon smaller or move it further away, and the Sun would never be totally obscured. What are the chances?
What struck me as strange, and still does to this day, is that few people seem to have considered the sheer unlikelihood of the Sun and the Moon appearing almost exactly the same size in the sky. I’ve pointed this out to a few people over the years. Some have experienced a dose of wonder themselves: “Now you mention it, that is pretty crazy.” Others have said: “So what?”
Science is more in the “So what?” camp. Its standard response to the miracle of perfect eclipses tends to be something like this: “Yes, solar eclipses are amazing, but they’re just a coincidence. Move along hippy, nothing to see here.” That didn’t satisfy me. I wondered: are eclipses really nothing but coincidence, as most scientists would have us believe? Or are they a little nod and wink from the Universe, a hint there might be some method to the entropic madness of the cosmos?
Dive down this particular rabbithole and you’ll learn some interesting stuff. Firstly, there are at least 214 moons in our solar system, but only ours produces what you could call “perfect” eclipses. To do so, a moon must be roughly spherical, and the ratio of its size to its distance from the planet it orbits must be the same as that of the Sun. In our case, the Sun is around 400 times larger than the Moon, but also about 400 times further away. This is what allows for the possibility of “perfect” eclipses. This paper by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez goes into this subject in depth.
As Gonzalez shows, there are literally no other planets in the solar system on which you could experience “perfect” solar eclipses. The closest other candidate is Saturn, which has a moon named Prometheus with the right ratio of size and distance. (Trust Prometheus to try to steal glory from the gods!) But Prometheus is shaped like an ugly potato, not a sphere. And it orbits so quickly that its eclipses are too brief to be significant. Our Moon reigns supreme.
It’s also worth noting that eclipses have been instrumental in the development of science. The spectacle of the day turning to night in an instant, upending the order of the mundane world, still has the power to impress us, even as jaded 21st-century moderns. But the ancients took eclipses far more seriously. The Babylonians, whose system of celestial omenology (the interpretation of signs in the sky) is foundational to astrology, thought that eclipses foretold the “death of a king”, and devised elaborate ritual practices aimed at forestalling such an outcome. They were so concerned about eclipses that they developed mathematical techniques allowing them to predict their appearance. Today’s astronomers may disdain astrology, but their discipline was founded and developed by the astrologers of yore, and eclipses were crucial to this process.
Further down this rabbit hole, you’ll run into Albert Einstein. In 1915, while the First World War raged, Einstein devised his theory of General Relativity, which held that gravity was not a force, but a distortion of spacetime. The implications of the theory were that space, and the light that travels through it, literally bends around massive objects like stars.
As explained by Smithsonian here, in 1919 an opportunity arose to test the theory: the total solar eclipse of that year. Einstein had predicted that a comparison between the position of stars around a total solar eclipse, and their ordinary positions when the Sun wasn’t present in that area of the sky, would show a measurable difference due to the bending of space around the Sun.
In May of that year an astronomer named Sir Arthur Eddington traveled to the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa with the objective of testing General Relativity. Eddington took photographs of the eclipse that was visible in all its glory on the island that year. His images indeed showed a slight change in the position of the stars around the Sun. General Relativity had been shown to be correct and Einstein, for his part, became the most famous scientist in the world. If we didn’t have such perfect eclipses, this may not have happened, and we might have had to wait years to develop the technology capable of proving the theory by other means.
Even though eclipses literally shaped the development of modern science, science isn’t particularly grateful. An article by Caleb A Scharf, director of astrobiology at Columbia University, in Scientific American entitled “The Solar Eclipse Coincidence” typifies the “scientific” view of the phenomenon. Noting the fact that in 50 million years the Moon will no longer appear large enough from Earth to block out the Sun, Scharf concludes: “So is there some great significance to the fact that we humans just happen to exist at a time when the Moon and Sun appear almost identically large in our skies? Nope, we're just landing in a window of opportunity that's probably about 100 million years wide, nothing obviously special, just rather good luck.” That “nope” is rather sure of itself.
At this point, it is fair to add that not all scientists buy the “coincidence” argument. Could it be that the sizes of and relative distances between the Earth, Moon and Sun actually need to be what they are in order to make life on Earth possible?
Scientists have long theorised that habitable planets must exist in a “Goldilocks Zone” in terms of distance from their star in order to support life: not too close, not too far away. Going back to Gonzalez’s paper, the Moon “keeps the Earth’s obliquity from varying over a large range, which would cause large climate fluctuations”, meaning that the Moon prevents the Earth from tilting further away from the ecliptic, which would lead to very severe seasonal variations that would make the Earth less habitable. Crucially, “the Moon’s mass must be a significant fraction of the Earth’s mass” for this effect to happen.
Here, we encounter science’s “Anthropic Principle”. In its “weak” form, this principle states that we should not be surprised by “coincidences” that allow conscious life to exist, since we could only ever exist in a Universe that allows us to do so. If we are here to ask the questions, we must be in a Universe that is calibrated for us to be here.
But it seems to me that while you could argue the Moon needs to be within a certain range in terms of size and distance from the Earth, it’s highly unlikely that the ratio of the two needs to be quite so perfect when compared to the Sun. Gonzalez agrees: “it is not that nearly perfect eclipses are a requirement for habitability but, rather, that they are an indication of the likelihood of habitability.” In other words, life on Earth doesn’t require perfect eclipses, and we could easily be living on a planet without them.
So what are we to make of this remarkable state of cosmic affairs, where the size and position of the two lights in the sky are so perfectly calibrated? I think we have a choice. One option is to listen to the materialists. They want, with a strange fervour, to convince us that nothing we perceive means anything at all. For them, as for Macbeth, life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Even if that were true, why would you want to believe it?
The other option, the choice I made that eventually led me to investigate astrology, is to conclude that this incredibly unlikely balance between Sun and Moon is communicating something important to us. It is showing us that we are not just accidental flickers of awareness in a vast and meaningless Universe. Meaning and consciousness are intrinsic to the cosmos, and we can enter into a dialogue with it, if we so choose.
Admittedly, the Universe doesn’t make it easy for us to decide “what it all means” or whether “it all” means anything at all. It doesn’t put the answers to life’s mysteries on a plate. I believe the wisest response, then, is simply to turn our gaze to the sky, wonder at the sheer miracle of the perfectly calibrated cosmic ballet we see when the Moon meets the Sun, and say: “I choose meaning”. It’s certainly more fun that way.