• Occupation: Actor, Writer
• Active: '80s-2000s
• Major Genres: Thriller, Comedy
• Career Highlights: Shelter, Best of the Best 2, Killer Klowns from Outer Space
• First Major Screen Credit: Hunk (1987)

Biography

Lead actor, onscreen from the '80s. ~ All Movie Guide

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John Nelson, a radio engineer specializing in the study of shortwave radio propagation, made discoveries that have had a profound effect upon the study of contemporary astrology. As an employee of the Radio Corporation of America, he had the task of exploring the fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field that affected communications systems. If those fluctuations could be understood and predicted, then steps could be taken to diminish their effects.

Disturbances in the magnetic field were directly tied to the magnetic storms on the Sun. The one factor that correlated with magnetic disturbances on the Sun was the position of the planets relative to the Sun. When two planets were either lined up with the Sun (what in astrology is termed an opposition) or at a 90-degree angle (a square), there would be disturbances. However, when the planets were at 120 degrees (trine) or 60 degrees (sextile), disturbances were noticeably quiet. Nelson eventually found that he could predict the disturbances on the sun with better than 90 percent accuracy. His results were published in several scientific articles at the beginning of the 1950s.

Nelson's work, while not directly related to astrology, was soon recognized as supportive of some significant conclusions of astrology. Traditionally, astrologers had suggested that oppositions and squares in a horoscope represented more negative aspects while trines and sextiles were more favorable. Nelson's research became a major element in the current scientific argument for astrology, but more recent attempts to replicate it have proven unsuccessful. Although many of his specific findings have been discarded, his work provided the foundation upon which additional research has been conducted concerning the relationship between planetary configuration and sunspot activity.

Nelson's work (and the work that followed from it) concerned the relationship of planets to the Sun, not to the Earth, as in the average horoscope, which is drawn with the Earth in the center. Such work provided additional impetus to the creation of a heliocentric (or Sun-centered) astrology. With the development of the computer in the last generation, such a heliocentric horoscope has become as simple to draw as has the traditional horoscope, and several astrologers have begun creating such a system of planetary interpretation.

Sources:

Nelson, John H. "Planetary Position Effect on Short Wave Signal Quality." Electrical Engineering 71, no. 5 ((May 1952): 421-24.

——. "Shortwave Radio Propagation Correlation with Planetary Positions." RCA Review 12 (March 1951): 26-34.

Seymour, Percy. The Scientific Basis of Astrology. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

West, John Anthony, and Jan Gerhard Toonder. The Case for Astrology. New York: Coward-McCann, 1970.

John Nelson was a prominent early U.S. lawyer, congressman, and diplomat who served as attorney general of the United States under President John Tyler.

Nelson was born June 1, 1791, in Frederick County, Maryland. As a young boy, he was educated by private tutors before entering the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg, Virginia. He graduated in 1811 and went on to study law with attorneys in both Virginia and Maryland.

He was admitted to the bar in 1813 and established a practice in his hometown.

In 1820 Nelson was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat. He took the oath of office on March 4, 1821, and served until March 3, 1823. He did not run for reelection but did support Andrew Jackson's presidential bid in 1828.

Over the next two decades, Nelson served the U.S. government in a number of unofficial capacities. He received the first of his official appointments from President Jackson in 1831, when he was named to a diplomatic post in Naples. He served as U.S. charge d'affaires (charge d'affaires is a title accorded lower-level diplomats) to Two Sicilies from October 24, 1831, to October 15, 1832. (The Two Sicilies was an independent Bourbon/Spanish-ruled kingdom located in southern Italy prior to that country's unification in the mid-1860s. The kingdom's capital was Naples.)

When Tyler assumed the presidency following the death of President William H. Harrison, he named Nelson attorney general of the United States. Nelson held a cabinet post as secretary of state ad interim at the same time. (The position of attorney general was not a cabinet-level post at the time.) Nelson served in both capacities from 1843 to 1845.

In his later years, Nelson resumed the practice of law in Baltimore, Maryland. He died there on January 8, 1860, and is buried at Baltimore's Greenmount Cemetery.

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