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Gauquelin5
( g5 )

This program is a PHP CLI (Command Line Interface) tool used to build opengauquelin.org, a database of famous persons with their birth times.
It provides a reconstitution of the data used in the statistical tests of astrology between 1955 ad 1996, by Michel and Françoise Gauquelin, Arno Müller, Suitbert Ertel and 3 groups of skeptics: Comité Para (Belgium 1976), CSICOP (U.S. 1979), CFEPP (France 1996).
This gives birth informations of famous persons grouped by occupation (profession).
Historical data represent:
  • 24 516 persons with birth time
  • 1 328 persons without birth time, with days.
This was possible with the help of Nick Kollerstrom, Kenneth Irving, Graham Douglas and Jan Willem Nienhuys, who sent unpublished data. See Credits.
The purpose is to build a reliable, verifiable, ranked by eminence and as complete as possible database.
The main orientations of g5 program are :
  1. Gather the historical data and merge them in a single database.
  2. Check and correct them.
  3. Connect the historical data to standard datasets like Wikidata and complete birth times to build larger groups.
  4. Build new eminence indicators and sort famous persons by eminence.
Step 1 is done but needs to be finalized (eg. timezone computation for all countries).
Step 2 is traduced by associating the persons of the database to their birth certificates. A draft mechanism was coded and used to complete the list of mathematicians: opengauquelin.org/group/mathematician. An easy-to-use interface hasn't been coded yet.
Step 3 A premilinary study found in wikidata 2 647 452 persons associated to 6000 profession codes.
Step 4 was analyzed and ranked lists of mathematicians were built.

One of the purpose of g5 is to permit a precise reconstitution of Suitbert Ertel's analysis of both Gauquelin and groups of skeptics - exposed in the book The Tenacious Mars Effect. This is possible thanks to the availability of Ertel's list of subsamples.

Note that g5 is not concerned by data analysis (performing statistical tests), it deals with data documentation and restoration.

Brief history

These tests, initiated in the 1950s by Michel Gauquelin, followed 3 directions :
  • tests on professional groups,
  • tests on heredity,
  • tests on character traits.
This program deals with the data used to build professional groups.
The assertions of Gauquelin and followers are :
  • we can observe anomalies in the distributions of some planets in the births of famous people ;
  • the anomalies are more important for very eminent people ;
  • these statistical anomalies can be observed only for natural births, the effect disappear for induced deliveries. For this reason, studies were limited to births before 1950.
One particular effect - the repartition of Mars in the births of sportsmen, called "the mars effect" - gave rise to very long polemics without any consensual conclusion. Very few members of the academic world studied the question, most notably Suitbert Ertel and Arno Müller. Ertel introduced citation count, providing an objective measure of eminence, and analyzed Gauquelin and skeptic tests.
The story ended in 1996 with two publications:
  • The "Mars Effect", A French Test of Over 1,000 Sports Champions, by CFEPP, describes the test conducted by the 3rd group of skeptics.
    It concludes to an abscence of statistical anomaly.
  • The Tenacious Mars Effect, by Suitbert Ertel, who analyzed all mars effect data, Gauquelin + skeptics, concludes
    - that statistical anomalies can be observed ;
    - that the negative results of skeptic groups are due to data manipulation.
Following debates between Suitbert Ertel and skeptics (mainly Jan Wilhem Nienhuys) lead to a disagreement, no consensus was found.
This story leaves at least two opened questions :
  • Can we observe statistical anomalies related to astrology ?
  • Did Gauquelin or some skeptic groups cheat ?

Why Gauquelin5 ?

There are several reasons to care about the data used to perform statistical tests on astrology :
  • Scientific
    History is so confused that the question to know if these statistical anomalies exist out of human bias is still open.
    We today have the means to reproduce these tests with better and more reliable data, and see if a consensus can emerge.
    This is possible for two reasons :
    • The availability of online civil registries permits to check birth times and correct historical data.
    • Internet provides many ways to rank famous persons by eminence.
  • Historical
    History of science is concerned, to study the attitude of the scientific community towards the claims of Gauquelin.
  • Technical
    These data are interesting because they contain birth time. And birth times are generally neglected in the web. Take for example wikidata : birth times are set to 00:00:00. There is no way to make the difference between "this is a date with no time information" and "this is a date with time = 00:00:00" (maybe there is a way, but I didn't find it).
    Birth times of persons better the web, give it more precision and can be useful for other disciplines studying human activity.

About this program

The name "Gauquelin5" comes from the initial source of information, "Archives Gauquelin version 5", from cura.free.fr.
The software, current documentation and all files containing corrections or informations are released under the following licences :
Related repositories
Current repository, github.com/tig12/g5, is related to 5 other repositories: See also pages Organisation and Installation.
This documentation is written in a globish as close as possible to english, but uses french conventions for capitalization, spaces and large numbers :
  • Names of months, weekdays, languages etc. are not capitalized.
  • The characters ; ? ! are preceeded and followed by a white space.
  • White space is used as separator for large numbers (for example one million is written 1 000 000).
  • Marriage is written mariage, address is written adress.

Credits

See opengauquelin.org

Sponsors

  • 2020 : Covid 19
  • 2017 - 2019 : Pôle Emploi

This software has a slow development pace because I do it on my spare time.

Repository created by Thierry Graff, 2017-04-28.