Science
c. 1214 to 1292, Ilchester, England
The medieval friar who argued that no reasoning is certain until experience confirms it, and who made mathematics and experiment the keys to the sciences.
Start learning Roger →Roger Bacon’s boldest idea, from Part VI of the Opus Majus : that argument alone can never make the mind rest in certainty, because only experience verifies a conclusion - and that a distinct science of experience…
Bacon opens the Opus Majus with a diagnosis of why even learned people err: four offendicula , or stumbling blocks - deference to weak authority, the force of custom, the opinion of the ignorant crowd, and the concealme…
Bacon’s conviction, argued in Part IV of the Opus Majus , that all natural knowledge rests on mathematics - that without geometry and number the sciences and the world cannot be understood - and his physics of &ls…
Bacon’s Perspectiva (Part V of the Opus Majus ): his study of light, lenses, the anatomy of the eye, and the rainbow, built on the great optics of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), which Bacon helped transmit to the Latin…
The most famous Bacon: the passages foreseeing self-moving ships, cars, and flying machines; his call to correct the Julian calendar three centuries before Gregory; his early notice of gunpowder’s force - and the…
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