My brother told me that his students have told him that when his cell phone reception is bad it is because of Mercury being in retrograde. Has any one heard anything a about this… it seems to me that a planet in retrograde is only related to Astrology.
Didn’t you know that cell phones are powered by astrology?
…
It’s BS.
Could depend on the technology of the cell phone in question. Mine tends to fade out when Jupiter aligns with Mars.
When Mercury is in retrograde and I’m far from the nearest cellphone tower, I get bad reception.
Well, sure, but what about when the moon is in the seventh house?
Then peace will guide the planets…
And love will fill the air.
Retrograde is used as a term in astronomy as well as astrology. That said, I suspect your brother’s students are having a great laugh at his gullibility, unless they’re ignorant enough to believe what they’re telling him.
That theory sounds like it was pulled from Uranus.
“Retrograde” motion of a planet–shifting into reverse every so often–does not occur, but what is called apparent retrograde motion is a real phenomenon in Astronomy. It has to do with our vantage point in a slow-moving SUV of a planet circling the Sun watching another planet–Mercury, in this case–zipping around it three or four times as fast as we do, but not doing it in the same shape racetrack. It’s called “apparent” because it’s a way that objects on different ellipses are observed at various times in their relationship.
Go the link marked “Linky” in that site, and notice how the lines are projected on the wall.
Sometimes when you’re in a car driving along side a car in another lane, or just a little back from that car, you speed up, and it seems like that guy is slowing down–but he’s not, he’s moving at the same speed as before. The retrograde motion is that sort of effect: Mercury seems to drop out of the running, but it’s lapping us so many times–Mercury goes into apparent retrograde three or four times a year–and in a such steep and different racetrack, we sometimes catch a view where it is lapping us in some way that it seems like it’s changing speed so much that it’s passed beyond slowing down and going in some kind of backward loop. Eventually in a few weeks our puttering around the Sun gets us into a position where we see Mercury back in it’s good old racetrack again, zipping along just as we always knew.
Mercury is associated with (speedy) communication–he is commonly referred to as a messenger. You poke around Astrology sites (or associate with those who give a shit, or pretend to) you’ll see that cell phone mishaps, communication mishaps, straight-thinking mishaps, are all to be expected during Mercury’s apparent retrograde periods. I’m sure your brother’s cell phone, when it does act up, does not do so with such regularity. If it did, he could make a lot of money by carefully buying insurance to cover a phone-related mishap for each future day of the apparent retrogrades–their exact dates can be found in an almanac for the next few million years.
If you want, Wiki has an article on apparent retrograde motion, and some dude on YouTube animated the seeming loop-dee-loops of Mercury last year.
By the way, ShariDella, welcome to The Straight Dope.
I think that’s supposed to be: And love will steer the stars.
I don’t know about Mercury having any effect, but I would like to mention that radio waves behave in decidedly weird ways sometimes. For example, signals in the UHF range (including many American military radios) operate on Line-of-Sight. If there is a hill in the way, or the curvature of the Earth, between a transmitter and a receiver, then the signal cannot go through the terrain to get from Point A to Point B.
BUT! It turns out that UHF signals could bounce of the Ionosphere, basically allowing one to bank shot radio signals to the far side of the planet (for example, the bit in the movie “We Were Soldiers” where Moore’s radio operator was able to tune in on radio transmissions from troops fighting in Vietnam, from their base in the US, was based on a real incident).
So yeah, I can’t figure out how mercury could affect radio signals, but I wouldn’t be too shaken if it turned out to be the case. Maybe that’s why I can sometimes get a wifi signal from my bed and I sometimes can’t.
In fact, even time of day affects radio waves (not to mention weather), but probably not those used by cell phones.
Cell towers have a range of about two miles, and signal strength can be affected by a lot of things within that radius. A planet 48 million miles away isn’t one of them.
Why are there clusters of cell towers on almost every building in my neighborhood in NYC?
I know there’s a hellacious amount of interference and reflection, but your phone has to see one directly or not at all?
One reason is they are owned by different carriers. The other reason is to make the cells for each carrier smaller to allow greater density of traffic.
That’s likely the primary reason. Each cell can only handle a certain number of connections at a time. In an area with dense population (like NYC), adding more cells (and, thus, shrinking the geographic area, and the number of potential users, that each cell must service) allows for more simultaneous users in the market.
Rats. That kills my theory that love is displacing radio waves and blanking out cell coverage.
OTOH, if love is steering the stars, what’s gravity doing with all that spare time?
I think it’s keeping it in a bottle.