Albert Sherman, professor of physics at Mallory College, is a speaker at the luncheon of the annual meeting of the College Science Club. As the newspaper's science reporter, you decide to attend because the topic sounds intriguing: "Astrology Is Bunk."

Here are some of your notes. Write a 250- to 300-word story for today's newspaper.

Astrology has millions of followers in this country. Generally, no harm is done by it. Reading the daily charts in the newspapers is as harmless as following Peanuts or Dilbert.

But some people do take astrology seriously. They make business decisions, marry and mate on the principles of the solar stirrings as interpreted by the astrologer...

Astrologers defend their field vigorously, but it is really quasi-scientific occultism. They talk about scientific research, but they pay only lip service to the search for scientific validation of evidence...

What distinguishes science from pseudoscience is its method. Some of these principles are:

• Falsibility—if the hypothesis is not true, you will get a negative result.
• Replicability—different researchers will derive the same results.
• Intersubjective verifiability—agreement between the advocate and his or her critic on the standards for verifying claims.

Astrology does not subject itself to these tests.

Finally, one of the simplest tests we use in science is a logical principle known as Occam's Razor. This says that when given two equally satisfactory explanations of an event, you take the simplest.

Incidentally, students ought to think of that when they do their own research. Nature is not complex. It loves order and simplicity.

But in the case of the astrologers, their work is a complex system of signs, conjunction and couplings whose interpretations no one agrees on.

Divining the fate and future of human beings from the position of the stars and other heavenly bodies is ancient man's way of understanding the universe, not modern man's way.

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