John B. Goodenough

The Sun sits on the second degree of Leo, the Moon at fourteen and Neptune at fifteen, three planets inside fourteen degrees of the sign the Sun itself rules, and both lights are certain. Fire takes four of his ten planets, water three, air two and a single one earth. The record says Goodenough co-invented the lithium ion battery cathode at fifty seven and won the Nobel Prize at ninety seven, the oldest laureate at the time.

Three closed figures appear in this chart and Uranus is a point of every one of them: two yods, one with the Moon and Jupiter and one with Jupiter and Neptune, and a T-square with Venus and Mars. Uranus is the planet of the late and unannounced break, and a record whose two dates are fifty seven and ninety seven belongs to a working life that did its deciding well outside the usual window. Three figures resting on one planet is the structural fact here, and not one of the three resolves on its own terms.

Venus sits square Mars at just over a third of a degree, attraction and drive disagreeing, and directly opposite that Uranus at just over a degree. Mars sits sixty degrees from Jupiter at three quarters, effort that pays and well timed action, which for a scientist whose timing the record states twice is the contact worth keeping. The Moon sits conjunct Neptune at three quarters of a degree, feeling without edges, strong intuition, and real difficulty telling your own feelings from somebody else's. Uranus alone was retrograde.

He died at Austin on 25 June 2023, at a hundred. The sky that day was unusually quiet by the standards of this project: nothing stood inside nine tenths of a degree of a natal planet, the closest being the transiting Sun square his natal Saturn, with the next three all beyond a degree and a half. The Moon was a crescent at forty four per cent, the phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done, which for a man handed the prize at ninety seven is the phase to leave this on.