Erwin Schrödinger

His ten planets divide evenly, four in air and two apiece in fire, earth and water, with five cardinal, four fixed and a single mutable. Four planets sit within a degree of a sign boundary: Venus on the first twelve minutes of Libra, Jupiter on the last half degree of it, Saturn on the last degree of Cancer and Neptune on the last three minutes of Taurus. The record says Schrodinger wrote the wave equation that carries his name, and invented the cat to show how absurd he found the standard interpretation of it.

Four planets that cannot quite be said to be in one sign or the next, in the physicist whose famous thought experiment is about a thing being in two states at once, is a coincidence a reader will enjoy very much. It is a fact about the calendar and about where the Earth was that August, and it is not an account of anything he thought.

Jupiter sits square Saturn at just over a quarter of a degree, which is expansion against caution: the swing between taking far too much on and taking nothing on, and timing that is repeatedly slightly wrong. A scholar who wrote the equation and then spent years arguing with what everybody did with it has that aspect twice over. Venus sits in easy contact with Neptune at a quarter, compassionate love, and Mars in mild friction with Pluto at three fifths. His Moon sits at twenty five degrees of Taurus at noon, with Gemini still possible, which costs this chart its closest contact.

He died at Vienna on 4 January 1961, at seventy three, in the city of his birth. Venus stood in easy contact with his natal Jupiter at a quarter of a degree that day and Saturn directly opposite his natal Mars at over half. The Moon was full and ninety five per cent lit, a phase that sees a thing clearly and usually through other people.