Studying Astrology and Distant Galaxies

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Byline: Jeffrey Marsh, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A visitor to the country cottage owned by the famous physicist Niels Bohr was surprised to see a horseshoe nailed over the door, and asked Bohr, "Surely you don't believe in that?"

Bohr replied, "Of course not, but I understand that it brings good luck whether you believe in it or not."

While the impish Bohr was presumably joking, Benson Bobrick takes very seriously the fundamental claim of astrology that celestial bodies, like Bohr's horseshoe, have a determining influence on individual human fate.

Mr. Bobrick, who has a PhD from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature and has been described in the New York Times as "perhaps the most interesting historian writing today," provides a sweeping demonstration in The Fated Sky: Astrology in History (Simon & Schuster, $26, 356 pages), his ninth book, of the power astrology has held over the minds of men for thousands of …