"No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth."

In our previous piece we painted the beginnings of modern physics using some pretty broad strokes. We saw how a number of thinkers came to the conclusion that a good solid look at reality was the most effective way to uncover how the world actually worked. In spite of a culture steeped in Aristotle's view of the world, these brave souls took a few tentative and courageous steps toward a new approach to knowledge.

Francis Bacon

One person who took more than a tentative step was Francis Bacon. If the name rings a bell, it's because we have met him before in this essay. Bacon's life took many strange twists and turns. He proved his academic ability early on, entering Trinity College, Cambridge at the tender age of twelve. By age 23, he had qualified as a lawyer as well as becoming a member of the British Parliament. He then went on to a career in the royal court of King James I (he of the famous Bible translation), eventually rising to the very powerful post of Lord Chancellor of England, a post roughly equivalent to deputy monarch.

In time this meteoric rise came to a crashing halt when as a judge he was accused and convicted of corruption. Within a year, he had been stripped of his offices, broken financially, and ruined politically. He lived out his days working on his writing which ultimately proved to be his bigger contribution. His major work was The Novum Organum (The New Organon).

In it he criticised the ideas of Aristotle—as found in his work, The Organon, for example—which were generally embraced by the Scholastic movement of the day. Bacon believed that there was more to knowledge than simply rehashing the past. True scientific knowledge, he argued, could only be had by carefully observing nature using the senses of sight, touch, smell, etc.

This idea goes by the expensive name empiricism and the way in which you apply that to scientific theory building is called induction or inductive reasoning. Today, this seems obvious and not open to serious dispute. In Bacon's day this was revolutionary stuff because at the time, science was a mishmash of Scholasticism, natural magic and theology. As we've said elsewhere, there was always a great concern that you didn't contradict the revealed wisdom of God.

Bacon and others got around that little problem by pointing out that science was no more than studying the magnificence of God's creation and was therefore above all to the glory of God. Bacon, like many of his contempories was and remained a devout Anglican throughout his life. In time, however, as more and more natural "laws" were discovered, the need for an intervening Deity became less and less. Francis Bacon certainly contributed to this by eliminating specious arguments.

You may recall his famous "idols"—Idols of the Tribe - Perceptual Illusions; Idols of the Cave - Personal Biases; Idols of the Marketplace - Linguistic Confusions; and Idols of Theater - Dogmatic Philosophical Systems. This was his way of ridding science of the metaphysical baggage of the time. Without meaning to be, Bacon became a pivotal figure in the history of physics and science in general. A bit ironic really, since he was not a scientist in the strict sense of the word. Unlike Newton or even Galileo, Francis Bacon was more interested in the methods of science.

So we see here the beginning of the empirical approach to science, using induction instead of deduction as the only legitimate way to learn about our world. For a quick summary of these two concepts you can take a quick peek here at the story of Rene Descartes and John Locke.

Speaking of Descartes, this might be a good time to look at some controversies surrounding how we acquire knowledge. Induction and deduction, not to mention empiricism are pretty "expensive" words that might obscure the real issue involved. Follow me if you will on a little journey. If we go back to ancient Greece we run across names like Plato and of course his famous pupil, Aristotle.

These ancient thinkers, along with many of their contemporaries, based much of their pondering on the idea that we have a kind of built-in knowledge. They felt that innate ideas and principles are placed in the human mind by a God or an equivalent being or process. In more recent history we find Descartes who had the same idea. Philosophers refer to this, logically enough, as innatism.

Before you're tempted to skip this as being too esoteric, just hang on a minute. It's kind of important. You see, one of the first people to run with the ideas of Francis Bacon was John Locke. Locke was a firm believer in the opposite idea namely that infants start out with an empty mind—a blank slate if you will. No innate ideas for John Locke. With that begins the whole argument which is still with us today, the so-called nature versus nurture debate.

The argument is simple enough. Are human beings the product of their nurture—their culture and upbringing, having all their ideas written on a "blank slate"—or are these ideas already there, the product of nature. If you look around you, you'll notice that many people still believe in nurture, the concept of the blank slate. However, many thinkers today disagree and they sound for all the world like latter-day Descartes. There is kind of a modern equivalent of innatism called Nativism, grounded in the fields of genetics, cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics.

Nativists hold that innate beliefs are in some way genetically programmed to arise in our mind, that is to say that innate beliefs are the phenotypes of certain genotypes that all humans have in common. (Source) That's a fancy way of saying, you're born with them. The nativist’s general objection to pure empiricism is still the same as was raised by the rationalists: the human mind of a newborn child is no tabula rasa at all, but equipped with an internal structure.

Unlike Descartes (who attributed this to God) they attribute this inborn structure to the natural process of many evolutionary steps. We're going to leave it at that for now, but be aware that this is far from an esoteric discussion among philosophers alone. As we've said elsewhere, this goes to the heart of how we do science. The pure empiricist will sift through endless data until some kind of pattern emerges. At least that's what they think they do.

In fact, most really good science is based on hunches and intuitions that are ultimately the product of what's already "hardwired" into our brains. Where the whole issue takes on a more immediate concern is in the area of the social sciences because here, especially, our ideas about nature and nurture have a direct bearing on the science. The argument about the blank slate is far from over and even today is causing some real harm. It would be wrong to blame Francis Bacon for this because at the time his "outside-of-the-box" thinking was sorely needed.

Finally as a reward for all of you who have bravely struggled through this bit, here's some juicy gossip for you. Like most gossip, it is most likely not true. One rumor that makes the rounds from time to time is that Bacon was in fact an illigitimate child of Queen Elizabeth I, the so-called Virgin Queen, because she never married. The other one is that William Shakespeare was just a front and that his works were actually written by, you guessed it, Francis Bacon.

• Innatism, Nativism and so forth. From Wikipedia.
• Steven Pinker's 'Blank Slate'. A review of this seminal work.

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