Ernest Lawrence

Fire and water take two of his ten planets each, with three apiece in earth and air, and five of the ten are cardinal with only one fixed. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record says Lawrence invented the cyclotron, which made particle physics an experimental science, and that two elements and a laboratory are named after him.

The Sun sits sixty degrees from Mars at eight hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is effort that comes easily and in a person's own interest: physical confidence, and somebody who does not need to be talked into starting. For a physicist whose contribution was an instrument rather than a theory, not needing to be talked into starting is the half of that reading worth keeping, and building a machine is the part of physics where it actually applies.

Mercury stands at an awkward angle to Uranus at under a fifth of a degree, thought jumping the rails: nervous tension, changing position abruptly, and being right in a way nobody else has the context to follow. In the man who made particle physics experimental, the third of those is a flattering fit and the first two are not, and a reading that offers three options and matches on one has matched by guessing three times. The Sun also sits in mild friction with Neptune at under a fifth of a degree, the self obscured, and Venus a fifth of a turn from that Neptune at half a degree, a real gift for beauty and colour.

His Moon sits on the fourth degree of Gemini at noon with Taurus still possible, so it is left out, and the cost is unusually high: the chart's closest contact of all runs to that Moon at three hundredths of a degree, and so does the closest transit on the day he died. Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus were the three retrograde planets. He died at Palo Alto on 27 August 1958, at fifty seven. Uranus stood in easy contact with its own natal place at four tenths of a degree that day, which at fifty seven is two thirds of the way round its orbit rather than a return, and Jupiter stood in hard contact with his natal Mercury at the same four tenths. The Moon was gibbous and ninety eight per cent lit, a phase that refines, questions and improves, and rarely calls anything finished.