Bacon and Modern Physics: A Confrontation

Abstract

The customary way to honor the memory of a great man is to single out his most meritorious contributions, the accomplishments that have made him famous, and to trace out their importance for our time. This is not the course I wish to follow, for it has always seemed to me that the errors of genius, the lack of foresight on the part of great men, are at least as interesting and often more revealing than their positive achievements. In Bacon’s case, it seems curiously true that the power of modern science and its tremendous pragmatic successes spring from its allegiance with Bacon’s teachings, and what we deplore in it, in its indomitability and in its apparent lack of relevance for the ethical aspirations of mankind, may owe their existence to an omission in Bacon’s understanding of scientific method which subsequent generations of scientists have been slow to discover.