2147 is the age period resulting from the current arc second speed of precession, at least according to the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession_%28astronomy%29 which gives a great year of 25765 years. But the same article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precess...nomy%29#Values gives the great year as 25772 years. It seems the equinox is now moving at a rate which would take it all the way around the zodiac in 25764-72 years. However, the rate of precession has changed over time. The wiki comments the rate of this change is now speeding up, but the exact rate and period of precession may not be computed, even for a single whole precession period, and it appears 'quasiperiodic' around 25,700 year average. The age could be a couple of years longer than 2147 years (ie up to 2150). My use of the constant is something I would like to check. If there is an alignment with the barycentre then it would be interesting to find out how this cycle has changed over the millennia. The 25920 figure is Newton's traditional approximation, based on the movement of one degree per 72 years as a round number. Graham Hancock claims that a rate of one degree per 71.7 years is imbedded in the architecture of Angkor in Cambodia.

There are deductive and inductive tests.

Deductively, if the mathematics of the Great Year, including my claim that the Age is a harmonic twelve part division of it, were shown to be false, this would undermine my theory. If the link between precession and the barycenter cycle was proved to be invalid this would weaken my theory but would not falsify it.

Inductively, there is potential for large scale data mining and statistical analysis, including Fourier analysis, to test for the existence of cosmic cycles in history. For the historical age claim in this thread, this inductive testing faces the complex problem of how to describe data points that are separated by long time periods. I hope this problem will eventually be surmountable, in which case it might reveal cycles of differing periods or none at all which would falsify the claim. An intermediate step could be, as I have suggested before, to conduct large scale epidemiological study of planetary effects, for example by putting birth and death dates of millions of people into a database and looking to see if any variance in lifespan correlates to planetary alignments. The SSB is an integrated combination of all planetary alignments, so a demonstration that no planetary alignments had statistical effect on life expectancy would be a test that would undermine the whole project of finding correlations between human culture and cosmic cycles. I believe these effects are at the liminal boundary of measurability so large datasets and good protocols are needed for testing. If large scale statistical tests found nothing, that would not necessarily prove planetary effects do not exist, just that they are so small as not to be worth worrying about. If the China data had not enabled me to spin a plausible story it would have been a setback.

On a side point, Karl Popper's theory of falsifiability strikes me as inadequate as a theory of knowledge. He sets out some implications in his book The Poverty of Historicism, where he lays into Plato, unfairly in my view, as the root of totalitarianism. I am presenting a rather extreme historicist argument here, and I would reject the claim that this is intrinsically, or at all, totalitarian. A problem with Popper's critique is that scientific knowledge is only a part of the encompassing narrative explaining human life. Plato suggests that society benefits from forming consensus around ideas such as goodness, love, beauty and justice, but these are quite untestable in Popper's sense. Popper seems to call for a skeptical relativism in which all untestable ideas are dismissed as equally subjective. In my case, I am arguing that terrestrial nature must be integrated into a cosmic framework, and that this can produce an objective narrative of history. To some extent this is based on values rather than facts, ie on a Gaian narrative about the nature of the planet as an organism, and the need for large scale immediate reform to address climate problems. Is calling the planet an organism a statement of fact or of value? I believe this narrative will in time be recognised as objective, evidence-based and testable.

Hi Laurele - I am not suggesting you wait, just that the forces involved are very large and complex. In its republican phase Rome sacked Carthage and Corinth in 146BC (~=>2001AD), but even these imperial deeds were outmatched by the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 70AD. The Roman Republic kept the military out of government, except for occasional annual dictators, while at the same time engaging in some rather nefarious military empire building. By the time of Empire, associated with Caesar crossing the Rubicon in 49BC (~=>2098AD) and then Octavian defeating Antony at Actium in 31BC (~=>2116AD), the republican military forces had evolved into powers of a scale that was incompatible with the checks and balance of Senatorial traditions. I am simply presenting a scenario in which ability to democratically contest may be less in future. The story of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus is an interesting way station on the road to empire.

Can we tightly define "Age" and "Great Year" in such a way that we can objectively determine if one is 1/12 of the other?
So we must look elsewhere.
But as life expectancy does not necessarily influence ages of exploration, etc, even if we found no correlation I don't see why this would cause you to reject the "Astronomical history" hypothesis.
What do you mean by planetary alignments? I suspect that this term could cover a multitude of possible confiigurations and hence finding a chance correlation seems to be not out of the question.

Also, see my previous comment.
In an earlier post I talked about "confirmation bias". Your approach here appears to be extremely prone to this effect. Can you explain how you avoid this risk?
It can only be testable if you are able to make observations that may, in principle, falsify the theory.

I still haven't seen a mechanism.

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Yes, what is the Mechansim? How do any of these Cycles, Great Years etc actusly make humans do anything? How doeas the suns roattion around it Barycentre make an Empire?

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This question of mechanism is the nub of the scientific potential of this theory. I will try to describe a plausible temporal wave mechanism, ie one that is physically possible. My explanation remains wanting in regard to the apparent power gap between described forces and claimed effects, so I can’t say that I have proved that ages have effects in history. My expectation is that harmonic theory will provide a mechanism, whereby tiny regular causes cumulate to produced big regular effects.

The wave function of precession is depicted at http://www.bautforum.com/attachments...iptic-wave.jpg , showing our terrestrial path against the zodiac in wave form. Our planet follows this path with two wavelengths, one cycle per year produced by the earth’s annual orbit, and -1 cycle per 25764 years produced by precession of the equinox. These cycles, with the day, are the main natural temporal structures for the earth, and can be analysed to determine their possible harmonic interactions.

Imagining the annual cycle as a clock face, there are four turning points, the solstices and equinoxes, at the four cardinal points of the clock. These four points produce a further eight main harmonic points evenly spaced at the remaining eight hours of the clock, physically marking the cusps of the twelve signs of the tropical zodiac. This is a piece of physics which underpins a working mechanism for effects of precession. If the year is depicted as a sine wave with solstices and equinoxes as turning points, we can use harmonic theory to posit waves at every whole multiple frequency, just as musical notes produce harmonics from notes of multiple frequency. The combination of waves with frequency double, triple and quadruple the annual wave function produces the twelve cusps of the signs, as per my diagrams at http://www.bautforum.com/attachments...anet-waves.jpg and http://www.bautforum.com/attachments...sine-waves.jpg .

If a clockface above the north pole is set to mark twelve hours per great year, recording the wobble of the earth’s axis by the position of the hour hand, each hour will record an age and each five minutes will measure a cycle of the solar system barycenter, with the hands spinning very slowly anticlockwise at a rate of one minute every ~35.8 years. (This minute period is very close to the Saturn-Neptune cycle, a main contributor to the barycentric pattern.) Within the mechanism of the clock we can picture another much faster wave cycle, perhaps analogous to a quartz crystal in a watch, marking the year. If this faster cycle produced hands on the clock they would spin clockwise at twelve hours for each 1.7 seconds of the other hands. Not exactly a thousand years as a day, but you get the picture.

The mechanism question requires that these two wave lengths interact in some way, with a harmonic resonance causing points in the slower cycle (Great Year) to reflect the quality of the same point in the faster cycle (Year), perhaps as something like a standing wave. If the precession does produce such a standing temporal wave as the framework for terrestrial time, it should be apparent in events occurring at the same point in different cycles, ie separated by ~2147 years. Given that the effect is hitherto sub-measurable, it makes sense initially to look for it in the biggest events of history, world shaping events such as the emergence of empires and dynasties, as discussed here.

As well as the intrinsic interest of finding cosmic cycles in history, two other reasons to persist with the question of a possible mechanism are that the theory of gravity also has issues with mechanism, and that our DNA has long strings of bases, more than 80% of the total, whose function is not known. Regarding gravity, the inverse square law is a description of observation, not a theory of mechanism. Hence it is scientifically legitimate to develop a mathematics of description as a step towards a mathematics of causation. Regarding DNA, it seems more plausible that the big stretches of our chromosomes with no apparent function are more likely to be for something we don’t understand than for nothing at all. My supposition is that one possible purpose of unknown DNA is as part of a cosmic regulator, linking our biology to long deep slow patterns of the cosmos, such as precession of the equinox.

Not successfully, though.

A successful rebuttal involves such things as objective, quantitative evidence, reproducible experiments, and falsifiable hypotheses.

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After a long discussion of the cycles, you are still not clear about what the mechanism of interaction is.

e.g. (Direct question) Is it the sum of gravitational effects from the astronomical objects involved?

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Yes, it is the sum of gravitational effects from the astronomical objects involved. However, this material suggests a more complex picture of gravitational effects, including harmonic effects, than is now understood. For example, Edward Lorenz's work on sensitive dependence on initial conditions can be applied to ecologies which evolve within pulsing gravitational cycles. The impact of gravitational cycles on complex living organisms is a gravitational effect, but this is mediated by a cumulatively adapted genetic response by the organism. Hence the gravitational mechanism is indirect, mediated through complex cyclic structures, rather than a direct immediate effect of momentary gravitational force.

So it's astrology plus hand-waving about imagined biological processes.

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I believe that you have misunderstood the key part of the work by Lorentz. It does mean that the evolution of the system is sensitive to initial conditions, but what it doesn't mean is that you can ignore the gross conditions. To use the popular image, to predict the weather x days in advance you may need to consider the beating of the wings of a butterfly on the other side of the earth, but you also need to consider the effects due to thermal forcing of the atmosphere nearby. In the gravitational context, the effects due to the motion of individual people swamp the effects due to any of the more distant planets.
Presumably you mean that we have evolved to be sensitive to this cycle. You have yet to explain why this should happen. Please can you explain what adaptive advantage there would be for an organism to be synchronised to these cycles?
As per my comments above.

I would also like to know how you avoid confirmation bias in your analysis.

So how do these small shifts in gravity actualy cause the Roman Empire and then cause the same thing to happen thousands of years later?

I don't see how it works.

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This discussion addresses the key problem of mechanism. My claim is that there are cosmic cycles in history. To support this, the following quote from Mugaliens in RTomes current thread Explaining Planetary Alignments Relationship to the Sunspot Cycle is highly instructive

This idea of cycles as producing a ringing bell is precisely what I am arguing for as the mechanism. RTomes made an extremely interesting follow up comment at #38, “The timing of the actual peaks in the sunspot cycle do not match those in the planets displacement of the solar interior. This is to be expected with the discovery of resonance, which means that in effect the sun has a memory, and that different cycles will have different lag periods according to their distance from the resonant period. Building a model of this is required, and this is really a job for a solar physicist.”

In effect I am arguing that the earth has a similar memory to the sun, coded in to human genes and culture, even karmic in its scope.

To further illustrate how the mechanism I am claiming illustrates sensitive dependency, the excellent RTomes thread Harmonics Theory provides numerous examples. One that I wish to draw on here is from #22, referring to http://ray.tomes.biz/b2/index.php/a/2007/06/28/p149 which shows that clouds on Jupiter naturally form a 72 point circle. Here we have a model for the sort of mechanism I am claiming for precession, a cycle in nature resulting from long term stable oscillation of a dynamic system. My view is that these cycles simply find their way into everything contained within them. If we are adapted, we ‘ring the bell’ of the cosmos, if not we are out of tune with nature. In the stoic tradition, freedom is the recognition of necessity, and I am arguing that cosmic cycles are a central feature of necessity. I see the adaptive advantage in the interpretation I presented at Precessional Cosmology, specifically Post #28 Precessional Cosmology where I explain my own vision of the structure of time. I suggest there that, due to the current position of the precessional cycle, our planet is evolving from a phase where belief was dominant to a new phase where knowledge will be dominant. Hence, in terms of adaptation, behaviours that are in tune with knowledge rather than belief are likely to be increasingly aligned to this cosmic framework.
Yes this is a good question, and the material on Rome and China that I have presented could well be skewed by my objective of showing that precession structures history. However, I think the mathematics of the claim makes sense, so the inductive material corroborates the deductive hypothesis.

Adapted to what?

How does being aware of some minute fluctuation in gravitry over thousands of years make Rome? What effect does it have?

I fail to grasp what you are saying is the mechanism for producing a civilisation through slight gravity fluctuations. surely the Sun and Moon would be totaly dominant? anything else will be lost in the BACKGROUND NOISE.

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And?...
Show us the path that leads from point A (precession, or some other astronomical cycle you choose) to point B (human history). Where is the thread that connects them? No, I'll be even less demanding: just show us how there could be such a thread.

You are still being far too vague.

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An organism’s conscious awareness is a minor factor in its evolutionary adaptation. An organism will generally be more successful if it fits its niche, regardless of its conscious knowledge. This is the nature of destiny. My view is that our planetary niche can be articulated as a cultural and spiritual cosmic reality, structured by the long regular cycle of precession. This is a big advance on pre-modern theories of cycles because it is framed against a purely astronomical reality. The gravitational cycle of precession is not a ‘fluctuation’ but a regular – effectively permanent - rhythm. The absolute regularity of precessional cycles, adjusted for minor change of speed produced by the increasing pace of the earth’s wobble, has been a constant not only for Rome, not only for all human pre-history, but for all terrestrial genetics. The principle here is that weak permanent large scale regular factors produce pervasive effects. There are many features of evolution, notably the 80% of our genes classified as junk, which could well be partly the product of adaptation to weak hidden causes that are overwhelmingly drowned out by the ‘background noise’ of more immediate things - but are nonetheless real. Sub-measurable does not mean nonexistent. More immediate factors produce the bulk of visible effects, but the point is that big weak underlying trends can be detected by statistical analysis, as the trends incrementally favour everything that is attuned to them and disfavour everything discordant. The permanent cyclic wave oscillation of precession should, in my view, produce harmonic effects due to its permanence, and these effects will necessarily be much much bigger than could be imagined by looking at one precessional cycle in isolation. Such permanent harmonic oscillation within the cosmic environment of earth should be expected to produce strong similarities between the shape of history at points separated by one age, as well as a structure of time whereby the rhythm of the Great Year follows the same regular path, in reverse, as the annual rhythm of the seasons structured by solstices and equinoxes. The thread connecting precession to history is that precession is the major specific long term structure of time for our planet, it exhibits harmonic resonance with the whole solar system through the 178.9 year oscillation of the solar system centre of mass, and the whole system is therefore entrained to pulsate to this common rhythm. Our DNA has entirely evolved inside this purely scientific ‘music of the spheres.’ Through sensitive dependence on initial conditions, our DNA retains and amplifies the sensitivity the first life had to its cosmic context when it came into being four billion years ago on our planet.

Probably the best example of word salad I've seen in a long time.

Please pass the Roquefort.

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Robert, that is a series of loose analogies, not the description of a physical mechanism.

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If you are talking about resonance, what is the Q factor required for these ages to have any real effect?

And a follow-up,
Why should there be a resonance in the first place? Whay should there be some structure within the human body that has a resonance frequency of the order of hundreds of years?

It just sounds like plain old Astrology to me!

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That's because it is. It's his particular interest, and nothing will convince him he's wrong. It's also irritating to me that you have to point out your questions, sometimes more than once, and remind him that it's his obligation to answer them--and when he does, it's a dense, generally incomprehensible, chunk of word salad instead of the one or two sentences--sometimes one or two words--that should be necessary.

Robert. I have questions on the table. Do I need to repeat them, again, in order for you to find them and answer them?

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My understanding is that DNA does not really "do" anything as such, it provides the means for having stuff built that does do stuff.

For example, our DNA does not pump blood, but does result in a heart being built within us, and that pumps the blood.

Conversly, Robert, you seem to be implying that DNA itself somehow detects these miniscule patterns of gravity and that it then somehow translates that into human activities that result in patterns visible on a national/cultural scale.

Is my understanding of your claim correct?

Or, do you think there is some organ in us, that we don't know about yet, that is doing this detection and control work?

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But why would decay or damping apply to oscillations of the solar system that are not subject to friction? Organic systems of the earth are steadily becoming more complex (catastrophes aside), so it is not clear to me how their relation to cosmic oscillations should be assessed against Q factor.

The mechanism of cumulative adaptation does not require that DNA “do anything” in order to adapt to its environment. The environment itself selects which DNA is able to replicate, according to how well that DNA fits the niche in which it exists. For example, as a forest climate dries out over millennia, tree genes that are better adapted to dryness will have more success, not because they do anything but because the context is better for their reproduction. Exactly the same mechanism applies to which DNA is successful in relation to encompassing cosmic systems such as precession, with the additional point that if it makes sense to say DNA ‘detects’ the diurnal cycle of day and night, then it makes equal sense to say DNA detects longer regular cycles.

Life is acutely sensitive to its context, much more so than is commonly assumed. The complex causal process of generation of life responds to all relevant factors, so if a regular structure exists in its environment then it is likely that life will take advantage of it. The basic evolutionary principle is that an organism better adapted to its niche will outcompete a worse adapted organism. An underlying genetic sensitivity to cosmic cycles could well have evolutionary advantages that we have only begun to imagine.

I thought you preferred Hollandaise.

Gillian, this comment illustrates nothing more than that the comparison of the concept of “frontier” between modern USA and ancient Rome is highly complex and needs detailed investigation to assess comparisons. It is irrelevant to critique a broad comparison by narrow legalism. What would make sense is if you looked in detail into events in the US and Rome separated by one age and compared them. I am offering a predictive cosmic tool which suggests that if you think America is now an empire you aint seen nothing yet. My examination of China was in response to this question. To repeat, no, these are illustrations not a basis. Yes. Your comment is an uncharitable reading. I have my own opinions as to why it is not good enough for some readers – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Str...ic_Revolutions This has been a very useful work-in-progress process for me of zeroing in on a coherent theory of precessional historical cycles. There are a range of possible approaches, starting either from events or from dates. Based on your helpful comments I now think the best approach to the theory of astronomical history I have articulated here is to start with dates separated by 2147 years and look for similarities in events. My hypothesis is that these similarities will be stronger than for events separated by other periods which lack a correlate in earth’s natural cosmic cycles.

See, this is what I mean when I say that you answer things in ways that make no sense. The question was, "What does being shown that something you cited was 200 years outside your estimated range do to your hypothesis?" In my mind, I can answer in two words--"falsifies it." Or, in a more optimistic, and I think unjustified, vein, "Shows me where I need more work."

No, no--a string of words that I had to read twice over to decipher.

So if we're picking dates, will you allow me to suggest one?

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