The fact is that the planets are monstrously distant from Earth. The closest planet to us, Venus, in continuous motion around the Sun, never comes closer than 40 million kilometers.
But let’s assume that the so-called astrological force does exist. Could it be some of the already known physical forces? There are four types of forces known to physicists today. The first of them is the force of gravity, or gravitational force, it is described by the law of universal gravitation. Every physical body has a property that physicists call gravitational mass, or simply mass. The greater the mass, the greater the attraction. At the same time, the farther the masses are from each other, the weaker the attraction.
Any schoolboy can calculate with what force a person is attracted, for example, to the planet Jupiter. Because of the enormous distance to this planet, the gravitational force to it is minuscule! In fact, there are no instruments that can register this force. You could say that the car on the next street attracts you to itself much stronger than Jupiter. Of course, a car has much less mass than the king of the planets, but the car is closer. Andrew Fracknoy, already mentioned, gave such a vivid example. An obstetrician delivering a baby has a gravitational influence six times stronger than that of Mars. In general, by all parameters, the gravitational force is not suitable for the role of astrological forces influencing our destinies.
The second known force is the force of electromagnetic interaction. It is described by Coulomb’s law, also well known to every schoolboy. The electromagnetic force, like the gravitational force, decreases rapidly with distance (if the distance increases by half, the force decreases by four). This force is much more powerful than the gravitational force, but it occurs only between electrically charged bodies. And electrically charged bodies are very rare in our universe. Although individual particles contained in the stars and atmospheres of planets may carry an electric charge, the number of positive and negative charges balances each other out. This means that all planets, including our Earth, Mars, Venus, and so on, are generally electrically neutral. And therefore, no electromagnetic forces, which could affect a person from the same Mars, simply do not arise.
Of course, an “advanced” astrologer might say that because we see Mars in the sky, it means that rays of light (electromagnetic waves) from Mars are reaching the retina. One might argue that Mars itself does not glow – it just reflects a minuscule fraction of the Sun’s rays falling on it. That is, we see the same light as the sun, only much weaker.
There are two other forces. These are the so-called forces of nuclear interaction, strong and weak. But the thing is that these forces work only at fantastically small distances, comparable to the size of the atomic nucleus. Let alone distances between planets.