The First Scientist: A Life of Roger Bacon - Softcover

Clegg, Brian

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9780786713585: The First Scientist: A Life of Roger Bacon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786713585 ISBN 13: 9780786713585

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2004

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Legend may have transformed the thirteenth-century English friar Roger Bacon into the Faust-like sorcerer Doctor Mirabilis, but he stands today in high regard as Europe's first great pioneer in the field of science. Bypassing the vicissitudes of Bacon's reputation, this definitive new biography by science writer Brian Clegg places the medieval monastic firmly in the turbulent and contentious intellectual atmosphere of his day. It also finds in Bacon's attempt to reconcile, or at least acknowledge, the variant methods and means of science and theology a quest that places him well ahead of his intellectual times. For Bacon brought to his inquiry into the nature of things his gifts not only as a lucid observer of natural phenomena, rigorous experimenter, empirical thinker, and gifted mathematician but as a theologian and philosopher as well. In his search for truth he would, like Galileo, suffer imprisonment rather than sacrifice his intellectual integrity. From Bacon's popularity as a teacher at Oxford and Paris, through his innovations in calendar reform, his experiments in optics, his designs for a flying machine, and, most famously, his development of the principle of inductive experimental science, this illuminative volume unfolds the story of a brilliant career.

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About the Author:

Brian Clegg studied physics at Cambridge University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has written a number of popular science books including A Brief History of Infinity, Light Years, The God Effect and Before the Big Bang.

From Booklist:

When science and Bacon occur in the same sentence, the Bacon meant is usually Francis (1561-1626), said to have formulated the scientific method. Clegg says it should be Roger (c.1220-92), the first person to argue that "natural philosophy" (i.e., science) should be based in mathematics, undertaken with an open mind, communicated to others, and, most important, conducted by experimentation. A son of wealth, Roger went to Oxford at 13 to prepare for a calling. He became an experimenter, theorist, and writer who, disdaining magic, expected phenomena to be rationally explicable. He spent a fortune, presumably his family's, on books and equipment. When the Bacons lost their holdings, Roger joined the Franciscans, which required giving his belongings away but opened the door to church sponsorship. A friendly pope's death and the accession of a hostile general of the Franciscans put Roger in solitary confinement. Released, he wrote one more innovative book before dying and becoming a Faust-like figure of legend. The Victorians revived interest in him, but twentieth-century carpers demurred. Clegg's enthralling book launches Roger Bacon's re-revival. Ray Olson
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