Popular Science Review - Knowledge is Power

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Review - Knowledge is Power - John Henry

There can be little doubt that Francis Bacon had a significant part in the transformation of natural philosophy into science. His enthusiasm for experiment and inductive reasoning must have contributed to scientific progress. But this little book totally fails to persuade that Bacon had any real merits.

The author is clearly highly enthusiastic about his topic - not a bad thing - but gets quite carried away. He tells us of Bacon's selfless desire to serve humanity, just before describing how Bacon prosecuted his own sponsor in order to gain influence and clawed his way up the power structure, only to be cast out of office for corruption.

Later on Henry exhibits surprise that Bacon had time to undertake the many experiments he seems to have made. From everything Henry says about him, it seems much more likely that Bacon made the whole thing up to prove his point, an approach that would seem highly in line with his character.

Henry also wildly over-exaggerates some aspects of Bacon's influence. He suggests that without Bacon no one would have moved from the old authority-based natural philosophy to thinking for themselves and basing theories on experimental evidence. Yet both Galileo and Newton quite independently of Bacon did exactly this. In fact, the sheer strangeness of Henry's view of the world comes through in the way he suggests that Bacon was more important to science than Newton.

The biggest concern about this book is inaccuracy. Any author is likely to make an error or two, but the sheer volume of incorrect information given in one page about Roger Bacon (no relation to Francis), as a definite example, throws the whole thing into uncertainty. This reviewer has to admit to a personal interest, having written a biography of Roger Bacon, which is why this particular example can be described in some detail.

Henry calls Roger B a magician - he wasn't, he was a 13th century Franciscan friar and hasn't been thought a magician since the seventeenth century, when the legend that had built up around him was gradually dismantled. Henry gives a quote from Roger Bacon to show how Bacon expected things to be made to happen by magic. Not only is the quote attributed to the wrong book (Communalia Mathematica instead of De Mirabile Potestate Artis et Naturae) it totally misses the point. Roger Bacon uses these examples to demonstrate how magic isn't necessary, because all these amazing things are possible through man's handiwork and nature. In fact in the very same work, Roger Bacon describes how the placebo effect works - that magic cures not because of any force, but because of the belief of the patient. (For a more realistic picture of Bacon see Clegg's The First Scientist.)

Worst of all, Henry strongly suggest that up until Francis Bacon, the only real use of experiment was in magic, not in natural philosophy. Yet Roger Bacon, nearly 400 years earlier had written a whole major section of his Opus Majus specifically on the importance of using experiment in learning about natural science, and giving optical examples of what he means - very clearly nothing to do with magic.

The impression one gets reading between the lines of Henry's book is that Francis Bacon was a scheming man driven by his search for power, who had some good (though mostly unoriginal) ideas about the way to undertake experiment and from his position of high visibility managed to win a crown that was almost entirely not his. This isn't what the book was intended to do, but certainly managed to for this reader. And that's a real shame, because it is an otherwise interesting book on an important topic.

Also in hardback:

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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