Paul Dirac

Only one of his ten planets sits in an earth sign, with three each in fire, air and water, and five of the ten cardinal. Venus, Mars and Neptune fill fourteen degrees of Cancer. The record says Dirac predicted antimatter from an equation, four years before anybody found a positron, and that he was famously silent, to the point that his colleagues defined a unit of one word per hour and named it after him.

The closest contact here is Mercury in direct opposition to Jupiter at four tenths of a degree, and the reading is scale outrunning accuracy: exaggeration, claiming more than was checked, and confident wrongness delivered well. That is the opposite of the man in the record on both counts. He spoke less than anybody around him, and the thing he claimed turned out to be true four years before the instruments caught up with it. Where a chart and a record disagree this flatly, the record is the one with evidence.

Mercury also sits in quiet contact with Mars at under a degree, which is mental energy that goes somewhere: thinking clearly under pressure, and finishing an explanation once it has been started. For a physicist whose equation arrived before the particle did, that is the contact worth printing, and it is a modest one. Mars lies at an awkward angle to Jupiter at just over half a degree, action outrunning sense, and the Sun sits sixty degrees from the Moon at half a degree, which is what a person wants and what they need in agreement, and an unforced sense of self. In a man whose silence was taken by his colleagues for strangeness rather than for contentment, that second reading is one the record cannot test either way. The Moon's sign is certain at fourteen degrees of Libra, where conflict is genuinely destabilising and a preference is reluctantly stated. Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus were the three retrograde planets.

He died at Tallahassee on 20 October 1984, at eighty two. Saturn stood in easy contact with his natal Venus at twelve hundredths of a degree that day and Uranus in easy contact with his natal Mercury at under four tenths, and nothing else came inside half a degree. The Moon was at its last quarter and twenty per cent lit, a phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.