偶然看到一本文集叫Geography and Revolution，如果译成中文也许当然是《地理学与革命》，可看了开篇的一段话，才发现我对“革命”的理解有点儿走偏了，它本来还有更不革命的一面呢：

Agricultural, chemical, Copernican, green, industrial, information, military, Neolithic, political, reading, scientific, urban: the term “revolution” is associated with a variety of intellectual and practical circumstances. Although the term was already in use during the late fourteenth century in reference to celestial bodies, the label “revolution” established its own distinctive identity with the publication in 1543 of Copernicus’s account of the motion of the heavenly spheres, De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. Within half a century, the word was being applied to affairs of state in a way that departed materially from its earlier associations. In its Italian form, rivoluzione, the term had been in use during the late Middle Ages as a neutral description of change in sovereignty. But from the late sixteenth century, revolution began to acquire its modern political resonance as the overthrowing of one regime and its replacement by a successor. Its deployment in the mid-seventeenth century to describe those events in England that are routinely gathered under the rubric of the “English Revolution” was crucial in this regard. So, too, was its association with the overthrow in 1688 of the Stuart dynasty—the “Glorious Revolution”—and, perhaps even more important, with the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century……

当那个词儿在社会和政治转了一圈儿回来后，味道就有点儿变了，就变成了中文的“革命”。它贴上这个“革命”的标签时，我们就容易忘了它与天体“运行”一样的意味。其实，我们古人就是那么想的：“天地革而四时成。汤武革命，顺乎天而应乎人，革之时大矣哉！”（《易经》第49卦“革”的彖辞）

我们看“科学革命”，其实更多是科学的evolution，真正“革命”的并不好说。所以，库恩谈科学革命时，说的是“范式”的更替，用那个模糊的概念，才好与政治的革命类比。例如他说（《科学革命的结构》第9章）：Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution? In the face of the vast and essential differences between political and scientific development, what parallelism can justify the metaphor that finds revolutions in both?而在“不革命”时，他强调“必要的张力”：科学研究只有牢固扎根于科学传统，才可能建立新的传统——这似乎就是evolution了。