Max Planck

Seven of his ten planets sit in earth signs and not one sits in air. Six of them are in Taurus alone: the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto, across twenty five degrees of it. Six of the ten are fixed, with a single cardinal. Mars was the only retrograde planet. The record says Planck introduced the quantum in 1900 as a mathematical device he expected to be temporary, and spent years trying to avoid its consequences.

Mercury sits conjunct Jupiter at twelve hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is large thinking: a natural teacher, with a standing warning attached about the detail, which is that the big picture is effortless and the small print is not. A record whose two halves are introducing the quantum and then spending years trying to avoid what followed from it is that warning with a physicist attached, and it is one of the closer fits this project has printed.

Six planets in Taurus say the same thing from the other direction. Taurus will tolerate a situation long past the point of usefulness because leaving is more disruptive than staying, and a physicist who produced a result and then resisted its consequences for years is that sentence with a date on it. Mercury also sits sixty degrees from Saturn at under a third of a degree, structured thinking without strain, and Jupiter sixty degrees from that same Saturn at under a fifth, growth that holds. No air at all, in a theoretician, is the count that cuts the other way, and air in a chart is a temperament rather than an aptitude.

The record carries one more sentence, which is that he lost a son to the First World War and another to the Gestapo. Nothing in this chart contains, predicts or explains either of those, and the only honest thing available is to set the sentence down and leave it there. The Moon sits in mild friction with Saturn at a degree and a half, need meeting refusal: difficulty asking for anything, and being far more self-sufficient than was ever wanted, and its sign is certain at nine degrees of Virgo. He died at Gottingen on 4 October 1947, at eighty nine. One contact came inside half a degree that day, the Moon opposite his natal Mars at twelve hundredths. The Moon was disseminating and eighty one per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land.