In history, epoch marks a significant change in thinking in human conceptual understanding of the universe.
Epicenter geniuses
The following is a epoch quote in respect to epicenter geniuses mixed in with a good amount of thermal word vocabulary:
“Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get vibrating through and through with intensely active life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is why great epochs are so rare, — why the sudden bloom of a Greece [Aristotle], an early Rome [Cicero], a Renaissance [Goethe], is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow so fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of the nation glows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertia long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away. We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. This mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why great rivers flow by great towns. It is true that great public fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses who in more torpid times would have had no chance to work. But over and above this there must be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse is far greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the rarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they always wear.”— William James (1880), "Great Men and their Environment" [4]
“Clausius’ ‘On the Moving Force of Heat and the Laws of Heat which may be Deduced Therefrom’ marks an epoch in the history of physics.”— Willard Gibbs (1889), “Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius” [1]
“Gibbs ranks with men like Newton, Lagrange and Hamilton, who by the sheer force and power of their minds have produced those generalized statements of scientific law which mark epochs in the advance of exact knowledge.”— Frederick Donnan (1924), “The Influence of J. Willard Gibbs on the Science of Physical Chemistry” [2]
“Thims' brilliant book [Human Chemistry] symbolizes the beginning of a new era (epoch) in human history.”— Georgi Gladyshev (2006), Russian physical chemist [3]