Jupiter-Uranus and the 2010 Scientific Breakthroughs

I’ve been noticing that both the macrocosmic and microcosmic scientific worlds are abuzz with the excitement of impending discoveries. This is an unusual situation, because discoveries don’t usually happen that way. For example, you don’t know in advance that you’re going to find new remains that reveal more about human ancestry, or a cure for cancer. But in both cases new, far more powerful instruments have just been put in place, so it’s like travelling to new worlds where you are bound to see new things, even though you don’t know in advance what they are.

On the macrocosmic level, a whole bunch of new telescopes, both ground-based and in space, have recently been coming into operation. One of these, the Kepler, is a planet spotter: we are at the point of being able to see earth-sized planets. From there it would only seem to be a matter of time, maybe the next few years, before we start detecting wavelengths of light from those planets that suggest the possibility of life as we understand it. This was pointed out recently by the astronomer Lord Rees, and it would be revolutionary, it would mark an epochal shift for humanity. It would suggest, for example, that life is a universal principle that turns up whenever conditions are right.

Microcosmically, there is of course the new CERN particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, on the Swiss-French border. It is being gradually fired up (after a sticky start that shut it down for a year) and has already set new records for the energy of its experiments. But that is only a start, it has orders of power left, and it is bound to reveal a whole new landscape.

Meanwhile a crucial breakthrough has been achieved by the Americans with controlled nuclear fusion, which is the Holy Grail of large-scale energy production. The American experimental method involves firing lasers at pellets of heavy hydrogen. For decades there has been concern that the resulting plasma would mess up any ongoing fusion, but this has now been shown not to be the case.

The astrological signature for all this is the upcoming Uranus-Jupiter conjunction, which is associated with periods of scientific breakthrough. Uranus is associated with the scientific mind and with brilliant insight, and Jupiter expands whatever it touches. The last exact conjunction (the most powerful of all the aspects) was in 1997, and shortly before that Dolly the Sheep, the first cloned mammal, was born.

This next conjunction begins in June in Aries, and then occurs twice more in Pisces over the following 7 months. The June conjunction is in an applying square to Pluto, empowering it.

So I expect this year’s Jupiter-Uranus conjunction (which occurs about every 13 years) to be unusually significant.