To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

by Steven Weinberg

Grosseteste had a great influence on Roger Bacon, who in his intellectual energy and scientific innocence was a true representative of the spirit of his times. After studying at Oxford, Bacon lectured on Aristotle in Paris in the 1240s, went back and forth between Paris and Oxford, and became a Franciscan friar around 1257. Like Plato, he was enthusiastic about mathematics but made little use of it. He wrote extensively on optics and geography, but added nothing important to the earlier work of Greeks and Arabs. To an extent that was remarkable for the time, Bacon was also an optimist about technology: Also cars can be made so that without animals they will move with unbelievable rapidity. . . . Also flying machines can be constructed so that a man sits in the midst of the machine revolving some engine by which artificial wings are made to beat the air like a flying bird.14 Appropriately, Bacon became known as “Doctor Mirabilis.”