Francis Bacon is one of the major figures in the history of science. He was one of the founders of science during the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, when the scientists of the age, or natural philosophers as they were referred to then – threw off the Aristotelian worldview for the new advances in astronomy and physics, which became known as the mechanical philosophy. Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth and planets revolved around the Sun, Tycho Brahe showed that the heavens were not eternal and unchanging, Galileo showed that the Moon and planets were themselves worlds, and Kepler worked out the laws of planetary motion, and Isaac Newton formulated the theory of gravity. In medicine, doctors and surgeons made new discoveries about the structure of the human body through dissection rather than relying on ancient authorities like Galen, and William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood. And Francis Bacon founded the modern scientific method.
Previously, scientists had based their theories on deduction following Aristotle. Although there were some experiments performed in the ancient world and medieval period, the standard method was to observe a natural phenomenon and then devise an explanation for it. Bacon changed this by adding that this new theory had to be tested. There have been arguments since about whether this test should be intended to falsify or confirm the theory, but testing and experiment has been the core of the modern scientific investigation since. And Bacon looked forward to a glorious new future of scientific progress and advancement which he laid out in his 1627 New Atlantis. As quoted in Heinz Gartmann’s Science as History (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1961) this ran
“We have also engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions. There we imitate and practise to make swifter motions than any you have, either out of your muskets or any engine that you have … We imitate also flights of birds; we have some degree of flying in the air. We have ships and boats for going under water and brooking of seas, also swimming girdles and supporters. We have diverse curious clocks and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also motions of living creatures by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes and serpents; we have also a great number of other motions, strange for equality, fineness and subtilty.”
‘Thus’ comments Gartmann, ‘Bacon envisaged entire branches of 20th century technology as forming an enormously extended field of human activities, including factories, ships, submarines, vehicles, aircraft and robots’. (P.4) Actually, the robots may not have been qu8ite such an imaginative leap, as by the end of the Middle Ages noblemen were hiring artisans to create animal and human automatons for display on their estates, as well as mechanical figures decorating clocks. Leonardo da Vinci built a mechanical knight for a feast held by one of his Italian aristocratic patrons.
As society has advanced, people have become more pessimistic about the implications and effects of scientific progress. The atom bomb and the threat of nuclear annihilation is one such concern, now joined by the threat of mass unemployment and even to the existence of humanity by AI and genuinely intelligent machines. Bacon’s is an inspiring vision, but I still wonder what he would make of today’s science and technology, which have fulfilled many of his dreams and advanced in directions he could not have foreseen.
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