Re: There's No Such Thing as a Scientific Revolution?
This thread has got me thinking about paradigm shift in religion. TS Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is talking as much about psychology and politics as about the role of facts and evidence in shifting opinion, both at elite and public levels. When I read his book, the chord it struck for me was regarding paradigm shift in Christianity. Jesus explained in the Bible that his ideas would not be understood, but would percolate through the society until 'the end of the age' at which time they would become comprehensible through a new son of man who would explain the inner truth and coherence of the seemingly fragmented and incoherent claims of faith. The key theme of the Second Coming, "behold I make all things new", is exactly a proclamation of paradigm shift. Similarly, the idea from Jesus that you cannot put new wine in old bottles suggests that new and old paradigms are incompatible.
As I see it, the old paradigm is the Age of Pisces, the period in which the spring point has moved through the constellation of Pisces, while the emerging new paradigm is the Age of Aquarius, following 2148 years after the Age of Pisces. This is a mythic reading of the cosmic data of the precession of the equinox. I've been studying the problem of dating the Ages, and the evidence is too weak to have any precision. However, the spring point moved across the first fish of Pisces in about 10 AD, so setting the date for the turning point of the ages around the year 0 seems a fair starting point. On this basis, the Aquarian Age is not due to start until about 2148 AD.
A further point here is that there is a strong natural division of natural cycles into twelve periods, evident in the geometry of the circle. Assuming the above dates for the Age of Pisces, the final period began in about May 1968, and the previous modern periods in about June 1789 and August 1610. These of course were dates of major upheaval, if we take Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter to be as epochal as the French Revolution and the storming of the Sorbonne.
On this model, we are now at a situation of phase shift from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, with the Pisces theme (belief) still politically dominant but the Aquarius theme (knowledge) emerging. Conventionally, Pisces is the sign of compassionate mystical belief, while Aquarius is the sign of innovative humanitarian knowledge. Seeing these themes as symbolic of the zeitgeist maps on to the observed growth of knowledge rather than belief as a guiding principle for human life.
The picture below is an entirely empirical model of this theme of how a main basic rhythm of the earth (axial wobble from lunisolar torque) maps on to human history. This picture is at the base of my vision of the new Aquarian paradigm.
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