The interactive · the intellectual-history compass

The paradigm-shift timeline

A century of converging evidence on a single page. Three parallel tracks — physics, consciousness science, and the contemplative traditions — plotted across 1900 to 2026. The recurring claim is the same on all three tracks, arrived at by very different methods: consciousness is a feature of reality, not a by-product of brain. The tracks do not merely run in parallel; they touch repeatedly. Bohm and Pribram meeting in 1980. Penrose and Hameroff meeting in 1996. Faggin and D'Ariano arriving at quantum-information panpsychism in 2024, around the same time Bandyopadhyay's lab confirms microtubule coherence at body temperature, around the same time Carhart-Harris finishes a decade of psychedelic-and-meditation entropic-brain data. The trilogy reads this as a single rising hypothesis, finally finishing its long convergence.

Click any entry below for the explainer. The page below the timeline names the pre-1900 contemplative inheritance the modern story rests on.

The pre-modern inheritance · the contemplative traditions whose claims the contemporary science recovers
c. 800–900Kashmir Shaivism — Vasugupta, Abhinavagupta c. 1273Rumi — Mathnawī c. 1320Meister Eckhart — sermons 1577Teresa of Ávila — Interior Castle 1582John of the Cross — Dark Night
Year
Physics
Mind & consciousness
Inflection points
The 2024–2026 convergence
The contemporary fact: across three independent fields, the same picture is now in print — quantum-information panpsychism (D'Ariano–Faggin), the Φ-field cosmology (Strømme), interface theory (Hoffman), microtubule coherence at body temperature (Bandyopadhyay), the entropic-brain framework (Carhart-Harris), and field-theoretic morphogenesis (Levin). The contemplative traditions said it first; the physics took the longest. Read the synthesis →

The timeline is a curation, not a comprehensive history; it shows the entries that bear directly on the trilogy's argument. The pre-1900 banner above is necessarily compressed — the contemplative inheritance behind any modern non-physicalist framework is millennia deep, not centuries. For the broader bibliography, see the Reading list (200+ entries, all linked). For the Synthesis essay that assembles these entries into a single argument, see The evidence.

← Reading & References