B:

badly aspected/placed: a planetary affliction, sign in detriment or fall, or a weak house placement.

benefic(s): Venus and Jupiter.

Big Bang: In the 1950’s there were two competing theories regarding the origin of the universe. One was the Steady State Theory by Fred Hoyle et al. Its thesis was that the universe was homogenous in both space and time, was always like that, and would remain so forever. The other more controversial theory was based on Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that all galaxies are moving away from one another at great speeds, and that therefore the space between them is continually expanding. George Gamow and a few physicists held this "expansion of the universe" point of view. They claimed that if the universe were expanding, it followed that the separation between galaxies must therefore have been smaller in the past.

Taking this argument to its ultimate conclusion, if follows that the universe must have been much smaller in the past, and at one time entirely located in a single point. Such an infinitely hot and dense point would necessarily have exploded in a cataclysmic creation event, and, if so, everything we now see in the universe must have come from this incredibly hot and dense point that primordially exploded in what is now called the "Big Bang."

In 1960 Bell Labs built a huge radio antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey to boost radio signals. The antenna collected and amplified very weak radio signals that had been bounced off large metallic balloons high in the atmosphere. Although the Holmdel antenna could transmit signals great distances, the entire system became obsolete when the Telstar satellite with built-in transponders was launched.

Two Bell Labs physicists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, had been doing research on galactic and intergalactic radio signals using masers (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). With the launch of Telstar in 1962 the Holmdale antenna was freed up for pure research. When the two physicists began to use it use as a radio telescope, they discovered an annoying background noise, like radio static, in the microwave range they were using. They first assumed the telescope itself was generating this noise, which hadn’t been significant for the antenna’s previous commercial use, but which did matter now. Because the noise was the same frequency and strength from every direction, they first ruled out the antenna itself as the source of the noise. They then dismissed "local" sources like New York City, radio signals on Earth, even radio signals from the galaxy or extraterrestrial sources. The physicists even kicked out pigeons roosting in the big antenna and swept out their droppings, to no avail. And the noise was the same throughout the four seasons, excluding anything in the solar system as the source.

At the same time Robert Dicke at Princeton was exploring big bang theories. He had hypothesized that if there had been a big bang, the residue from that explosion would by now, some 13.7 billion years later, be reduced in temperature to a low-level uniform background microwave radiation throughout the entire universe. His computations predicted that the temperature left over from the big bang would today be about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, exactly what the two Bell Labs physicists had been seeing everywhere as "noise" in their Holmdel radio telescope! Dicke had in fact been searching for evidence of his theory when the two physicists got in touch with him, at which point he told his fellow-scientists, "We’ve been scooped." Many researchers had actually already stumbled on this phenomenon, but had either discounted it or not understood its significance. This was partly because in the 1950s the study of the early universe was not regarded as what a respectable scientist would devote his time to.

All that has changed since their 1965 discovery. The "noise" in the Holmdel radio telescope is now known as the cosmic background radiation, or, more poetically, "the sound of the beginning of the universe." Since the 1970s the big-bang theory has become the standard cosmological model. In 1978 Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias received the Nobel Prize for physics. Many consider their discovery, with Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, one of the three great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. A colleague at Holmdel remarked that Penzias was "an unusually lucky guy. Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson were trying to find the source of excess noise in their antenna, where pigeons were roosting. They spent hours searching for and removing the pigeon dung. Still the noise remained, and was later identified with the Big Bang. Thus, they looked for dung but found gold, which is just opposite of the experience of most of us."

In 1962 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two Bell Labs physicists using a large New Jersey radio telescope, found a background “noise” everywhere they looked in the sky. Simultaneously at nearby Princeton University, Robert Dicke had hypothesized that if in fact there had been a big bang, the residue from that explosion would by now, some 13.7 billion years later, be reduced in temperature to a low-level uniform background radiation throughout the entire universe. His computations predicted that the temperature left over from the big bang would today be about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, exactly what the two Bell Labs physicists were seeing everywhere as "noise" in their Holmdel radio telescope! This was extraordinarily strong supporting evidence of the Big Bang theory.

biquintile: a 144° aspect, 2/5th of a circle.

biseptile: a 102.86° aspect, 2/7th of a circle.

Bode's law: First stated by Johann Titius in 1766, this formula "predicting" the semi-major axis of each planet's orbit around the Sun was made prominent by Johann Bode ten years later in 1776. The Titius-Bode law states that the a planet's semi-major axis in AU (1 astronomical unit = the Earth-Sun distance) is 0.4 + (0.3)2n where n = - infinity for Mercury , 0 for Venus, 1 for Earth, 2 for Mars, 3 for the asteroids, 4 for Mars, and so on to 8 for Pluto. The first test of the law occurred five years later in 1781 when William Herschel discovered Uranus at the distance predicted by the formula. Neptune, however, discovered on September 23, 1846, is much closer to the Sun than predicted by this law; Pluto actually occupies the n = 8 position. Although there is a high correlation for the positions of all the planets except Neptune, the law probably has no physical significance, particularly having to allow n = - infinity for Mercury. Some newly discovered extra-solar systems seem to follow the Titius-Bode law, whereas others do not.