ROURKELA, Feb. 9: “We want to listen what we like and the astrologer does that, plays to our psyche,” said Prof. Dr Jayant Narlikar, the famed Astrophysicist, here while speaking on the topic “Astrology-Pseudo Science” for a packed audience at the Civic Centre here.
He, however, found it very difficult to convince the gathering when he said: "It is not advisable to believe in astrology." Like he said in USA, the horoscope of 2,978 persons were taken for matching and it consisted couples with excellent married life and divorced or separated ones. And he said the astrologers could not predict about the couples correctly from the samples and here he did not furnish any clear figure or statistical data of the study.
“We took the horoscope of 100 mentally retarded and 100 bright children and jumbled them up. Finally, we tried to find out from the astrologers whether they can spot them rightly in which 50 persons participated. We gave 40 horoscopes to each individual. Surprisingly many did not return their findings to us and of those who did the highest was 22 correct answers and 17 was the average. And it was like the chances one takes with coins where the chances of heads and tails always come.”
During the question hour session, when he was asked that a recent study by a reputed and widely believed and accepted house showed that every third American believes in some kind of Astrology he was not ready to accept. He tired to downplay by saying it was another media stunt.