With a brilliant full moon ruining this month’s Perseid meteor shower, it’s tempting to make our natural satellite a scapegoat for other problems as well, as people have through the ages. The full moon, of course, does not foster mental illness--psychiatric hospital admissions show no rise. There’s no link to crime either, at least not according to a study in Dade County, Florida. And there are no more births nine months after the full moon than after any other phase. Even so, attributing surprising powers to the moon is not as misbegotten an idea as it sounds. Recent studies have turned up some cor-relations that are almost as unexpected and odd as any found in folklore.
Even before Isaac Newton explained the phenomenon, people had noticed the synchroneity of lunar phases with the rise and fall of the ocean tides. More recently the moon has been found to deform--by several ...
