Vida michel gauquelin biography

French psychologist and writer who attempted to put astrology on a scientific basis through his special studies of correlation between personality and cosmic influences.

Michel Gauquelin Obituary by Hans Eysenck. The Independent 20 June News Page. Past Articles. Site Map. He published many books on his research, mostly of course in French, but some have been translated into English: his latest, Neo-Astrology: a Copernican Revolution, will be published by Penguin-Arkana at the end of August. He also studied thousands of non-eminent control subjects, to counter criticisms of his statistics.

His work-rate aided by his first wife, Francoise, who co-authored many of his articles was astonishing; all his data were transferred to computer, and were made available to critical scrutiny for testing.

Michel Gauquelin was born at in Paris, and died there His interest in astrology began quite early.

He encountered much criticism by people who thought he was trying to advocate an uncritical return to astrology, yet most of his published work was highly critical of traditional astrology, and its lack of scientific methodology. His own work is exemplary, replicating his original findings many times, in different countries, and modifying his methods to accommodate criticisms he thought justified.

As would be expected on the dual threshold hypothesis, women showed the Mars effect twice as strongly as men. Another important finding was that personality seemed to be involved in planetary effects. Thus extroverts tended to be born under Mars, introverts under Saturn. But these rules seemed to obtain only for people eminent in their various professions; results with ordinary people have been inconclusive.

There can no longer be any doubt that Michel Gauquelin did discover something; questions remain about its importance. The effect, while real, is modest in size; it certainly has no practical importance. Gauquelin had no doubt about the importance of his discovery, which he likened to a Copernican revolution.