Francis Bacon

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In an attempt to avoid the fate of Francis Bacon one winter, Half-cocked Jack leads Eliza on a search for hot springs in Bohemia while making a getaway from Vienna.

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Aristotle was partially discredited by radical humanists, who made fun of the medieval scholars who had taken him most seriously, and by the Protestant reformers, who assailed the Catholic theology which had been carefully constructed by Aristotelian deduction. But it was reserved for Francis Bacon (Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Albans) (January 21, 1561 - April 9, 1626) achieved fame as an English philosopher, statesman, and essayist, to point out all the shortcomings of the ancient method and to propose a practicable supplement.

A famous lawyer, lord chancellor of England under James I, a born scientist, a brilliant essayist, he wrote several philosophical works of first-rate importance, of which the Advancement of Learning (1604) and the Novum Organum (1620) are the most famous. It is in these works that he summed up the faults which the widening of knowledge in his own day was disclosing in ancient and medieval thought and set forth the necessity of slow laborious observation of facts as antecedent to the assumption of any general principle. His philosophical works lay out a complex methodology for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method.

In March of 1626, while driving near Highgate, Bacon decides to experiment with the effect of cold on the decay of meat, purchases a fowl and stuffs it with snow. Catches cold and develops bronchitis, dying on April 9 of that year. Such are the perils of the empiricist. Empiricism is the belief in philosophy or psychology that all knowledge is the result of our experiences. materialism and positivism and opposed to Continental Rationalism or Intuitionism. Empiricism is generally regarded as being at the heart of the modern scientific method, that our theories should be based on our observations of the world rather than on intuition or faith; that is, empirical research, inductive reasoning and deductive logic. Names associated with empiricism include Aristotle, Francis Bacon, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.

Scientific method

The enunciation of a scientific method by Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century described a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation and the need for independent verification. This view, itself inspired by an arab alchemical tradition not endorsed by christian ecclesiastical authority, led to Francis Bacon (in 1620 with the New Organon) laying down some methods for identifying causation between phenomena. With these articulations, unfounded speculation and analogical arguments began to be replaced by consistent and logical methods of investigation.

It is common to speak as if a single approach of this type were how scientists operate literally and all the time. Most historians, philosophers and sociologists regard this perspective as naïve, and view the actual progress of science as more complicated and haphazard. The actual course of scientific progress is inseparable from the politics and culture of science; a single, formal process cannot suffice either to explain or prescribe scientific progress.

The question of how science operates is important well beyond the academic community. In the judicial system and in policy debates, for example, a study's deviation from accepted scientific practice is grounds to reject it as "junk science." Whether strictly formularizable or not, science represents a standard of proficiency and reliability, and this is due at least in part to the way scientists work.

The idealized scientific method

The essential elements of the scientific method are traditionally described as follows:

Observe: Observe or read about a phenomenon.
Hypothesize: Wonder about your observations, and invent a hypothesis, a 'guess', which could explain the phenomenon or set of facts that you have observed.
Test
- Predict: Use the logical consequences of your hypothesis to predict observations of new phenomena or results of new measurements.
- Experiment: Perform experiments to test the accuracy of these predictions.
Conclude: Accept or refute hypothesis
- Evaluate: Search for other possible explanations of the result until you can show that your guess was indeed the explanation, with confidence.
- Formulate new hypothesis

These activities do not describe all that scientists do. This simplified method is useful for teaching, since it describes the way in which scientists often think of themselves as acting. This idealised process is often misinterpreted as applying to scientists individually rather than to the scientific enterprize as a whole. Science is a social activity, and one scientist's theory or proposal cannot become accepted unless it has been published, peer reviewed, criticised, and finally accepted by the scientific community.

Observation

The scientific method begins with observation. Observation often demands careful measurement. It also requires the establishment of operational definitions of measurements and other relevant concepts. Definitions are not scientific hypotheses; they are not "falsifiable"; they are always true or tautological. Definitions condense a number of ideas into a single word or phrase. That being said, an observer's definition could differ significantly from commonly understood concepts of a term, and still be correct. Such a definition, however, would carry greater risk of being misunderstood. These definitions are operational in that they may differ with the context of a hypothesis, and they may be refined when the hypothesis is refined.

For example, the term "day" is useful in ordinary life and its meaning may vary with the context. (Do we mean a 24 hour period or do we mean the time between sunrise and sunset?) We don't have to define it precisely to make use of it. In many sciences it is precisely 86,400 atomic seconds. In studying the motion of the Earth, we may use two distinct operational definitions: a solar day is the time between two successive observations of the sun at the same position in the sky; a sidereal day is the time between two successive observations a specific star sky at the same position. The length of these two kinds of day differs by about four minutes.

Slight differences between operational definitions are often important, as they are needed to make experiments precise enough to distinguish subtle underlying phenomena. An example of this lies in choosing the appropriate segmentation in the statistical analysis of data. Distinctions in operational definitions can also reflect important conceptual differences: for example, mass and weight are regarded as quite different concepts in science, but the distinction is often ignored in everyday life.

Hypothesis

To explain the observation, scientists use whatever they can (their own creativity (currently not well understood), ideas from other fields, or even systematic guessing, or any other methods available) to come up with possible explanations for the phenomenon under study.

In the twentieth century Karl Popper introduced the idea that a hypothesis must be falsifiable; that is, it must be capable of being demonstrated wrong. Paul Feyerabend argued against this position, providing examples of falsified scientific theories that nevertheless had a vital role in the progress of scientific understanding.

Of course, it is impossible for the scientist to be impartial, considering all known evidence, and not merely evidence which supports the hypothesis under development. But by submitting their theories for peer review, scientists can at least make it more likely that the hypotheses formed will be relevant and useful, or at least get others to agree with it.

In the extremely rare cases where no better grounds for discriminating between rival hypotheses can be found, the bias scientists almost always follow is the principle of Occam's Razor; one chooses the simplest explanation for all the available evidence.

Prediction

A hypothesis must make specific predictions; these predictions can be tested with concrete measurements to support or refute the hypothesis. For instance, Albert Einstein's General Relativity makes a few specific predictions about the structure of space-time, such as the prediction that light bends in a strong gravitational field, and the amount of bending depends in a precise way on the strength of the gravitational field. Observations made of a 1919 solar eclipse supported the hypothesis (ie, General Relativity) as against those of the other possible hypotheses which did not make such a prediction. (Later experiments confirmed this even further.)

Deductive reasoning is the way in which predictions are used to test a hypothesis.

Verification

Probably the most important aspect of scientific reasoning is verification: The results of one's experiments must be verified. Verification is the process of determining whether the hypothesis is in accord with empirical evidence, and whether it will continue to be in accord with a more generally expanded body of evidence.

Ideally, the experiments performed should be fully described so that anyone can reproduce them, and many scientists should independently verify every hypothesis. Results which can be obtained from experiments performed by many are termed reproducible and are given much greater weight in evaluating hypotheses than non reproducible results.

Scientists must design their experiments carefully. For example, if the measurements are difficult to make, or subject to observer bias, one must be careful to avoid distorting the results by the experimenter's wishes. When experimenting on complex systems, one must be careful to isolate the effect being tested from other possible causes of the intended effect (this results in a controlled experiment). In testing a drug, for example, it is important to carefully test that the supposed effect of the drug is produced only by the drug itself, and not by the placebo effect or by random chance. Doctors do this with what is called a double-blind study: two groups of patients are compared, one of which receives the drug and one of which receives a placebo. No patient in either group knows whether or not they are getting the real drug; even the doctors or other personnel who interact with the patients don't know which patient is getting the drug under test and which is getting a fake drug (often sugar pills), so their knowledge can't influence the patients either.

Evaluation

Falsificationism argues that any hypothesis, no matter how respected or time-honoured, must be discarded once it is contradicted by new reliable evidence. This is of course an oversimplification, since individual scientists inevitable hold on to their pet theory long after contrary evidence has been found. This is not always a bad thing. Any theory can be made to correspond to the facts, simply by making a few adjustments called auxiliary hypothesis so as to bring it into correspondence with the accepted observations. The choice of when to reject one theory and accept another is inevitably up to the individual scientist, rather than some methodical law.

Hence all scientific knowledge is always in a state of flux, for at any time new evidence could be present that contradicts long-held hypotheses. A classic example is the explanation of light. Isaac Newton's particle paradigm was overturned by the wave theory of light, which explained diffraction, and which was held to be incontrovertible for many decades.The wave paradigm, in turn was refuted by the discovery of the photoelectric effect. The currently held theory of light holds that photons (the 'particles' of light) are both waves and particles; experiments have been performed which demonstrate that light has both particle and wave properties.

The experiments that reject a hypothesis should be performed by many different scientists to guard against bias, mistake, misunderstanding, and fraud. Scientific journals use a process of peer review, in which scientists submit their results to a panel of fellow scientists (who may or may not know the identity of the writer) for evaluation. Scientists are rightly suspicious of results that do not go through this process; for example, the cold fusion experiments of Fleischmann and Pons were never peer reviewed -- they were announced directly to the press, before any other scientists had tried to reproduce the results or evaluate their efforts. They have not been reproduced elsewhere as yet; and the press announcement was regarded, by most nuclear physicists, as very likely wrong. Peer review may well have turned up problems and led to a closer examination of the experimental evidence Fleischmann, Pons, et al believed they had. Much embarrassment, and wasted effort worldwide, would have been avoided.

Other sources

"Bacon, Francis." Encyclopedia Britannica,1957.
"Bacon, Francis." Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967