The first scientist

First lines

In the early summer of 1292, in the Franciscan friary at Oxford, an old man lay dying.

About this book

"Roger Bacon, a humble and devout English friar, seems an unlikely figure to challenge the orthodoxy of his day - yet this unworldly man risked his life to establish the basis for true scientific knowledge.". "Born around 1220, Bacon was passionately interested in the natural world and how things worked (he made lists of possible inventions 300 years before Leonardo da Vinci). Banned from writing on such dangerous topics by his Order, it was only when a new pope proved sympathetic that he began compiling his encyclopedia of knowledge, on everything from optics to alchemy - the synopsis took him a year and ran to 800,000 words and he was never to complete the work itself. Sadly, the enlightened pope died before he could read it, and Bacon was tried as a magician and incarcerated for ten years.". "Legend transformed Bacon into a sorcerer, 'Doctor Mirabilis', yet he taught that all magic was fraudulent, based on human ability to deceive, and we can recognize today that his books were the first flowering of the scientific knowledge that would transform our world. He advanced the understanding of optics, he demanded a new calendar that prefigured the Gregorian reform, made geographical breakthroughs later used by Columbus, predicted everything from horseless carriages to the telescope, and stressed the importance of mathematics to science, a significance that would not be recognized for 400 years. Yet his biggest contribution was to link science and experiment, to insist that a study of the natural world by observation and exact measurement was the surest foundation for tru…

Themes & subjects