WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.520 Imagine, if you will, a cramped stone chamber. 00:00:02.859 --> 00:00:05.339 It's in the turret of a gatehouse, and it is 00:00:05.339 --> 00:00:07.740 the middle of the night. Okay. The only light 00:00:07.740 --> 00:00:09.660 is coming from this flickering tallow candle 00:00:09.660 --> 00:00:12.359 that smells, you know, faintly of animal fat. 00:00:13.119 --> 00:00:15.660 And shadows are dancing across the table that's 00:00:15.660 --> 00:00:19.379 just covered in strange instruments, glass lenses, 00:00:19.600 --> 00:00:22.579 astrolabes, bubbling flasks of colored liquid. 00:00:22.800 --> 00:00:24.559 It sounds like the opening scene of a fantasy 00:00:24.559 --> 00:00:27.210 novel. Or maybe a horror movie right before the 00:00:27.210 --> 00:00:29.649 monster jumps out. It really does. And in the 00:00:29.649 --> 00:00:32.049 center of this room, right in the middle of all 00:00:32.049 --> 00:00:34.770 this clutter, sits a head. A life -size human 00:00:34.770 --> 00:00:38.289 head, but it's made entirely of brass. Ah. And 00:00:38.289 --> 00:00:39.890 the legend says, because we have to start with 00:00:39.890 --> 00:00:42.270 the legend, that this head was basically a supercomputer 00:00:42.270 --> 00:00:45.090 made of clockwork and magic. The famous brazen 00:00:45.090 --> 00:00:47.490 head, of course. Exactly. So the story goes that 00:00:47.490 --> 00:00:50.350 the man who built it, a friar, had spent seven 00:00:50.350 --> 00:00:52.929 years of his life crafting it. He believed it 00:00:52.929 --> 00:00:55.210 could answer any question in the universe. Any 00:00:55.210 --> 00:00:57.909 question at all. But he was so exhausted from 00:00:57.909 --> 00:01:00.030 the work that he told his assistant, wake me 00:01:00.030 --> 00:01:02.109 up if it speaks, and then he just collapsed into 00:01:02.109 --> 00:01:04.109 sleep. And naturally, the assistant messes it 00:01:04.109 --> 00:01:06.609 up. Of course he does. The head speaks three 00:01:06.609 --> 00:01:10.659 times. It says, time is. Then there's a pause. 00:01:10.840 --> 00:01:15.280 Then time was. And finally, its last words. Time 00:01:15.280 --> 00:01:17.879 is past. And then it self -destructs. With a 00:01:17.879 --> 00:01:21.079 deafening crash, the brass head shatters into 00:01:21.079 --> 00:01:24.299 a thousand pieces. A tragic loss of data. I mean, 00:01:24.299 --> 00:01:26.719 that's the ultimate missed voicemail of the Middle 00:01:26.719 --> 00:01:30.000 Ages. If it were true. But that's the thing. 00:01:30.060 --> 00:01:31.959 That is the myth of the man we are talking about 00:01:31.959 --> 00:01:34.459 today. To the folklore of the 16th century, he 00:01:34.459 --> 00:01:37.200 was a wizard, a necromancer, a man who tricked 00:01:37.200 --> 00:01:39.439 the devil. Right. But if you open a history of 00:01:39.439 --> 00:01:41.719 science textbook today. He is something else 00:01:41.719 --> 00:01:44.799 entirely. He's the Dr. Mirabilis, the wonderful 00:01:44.799 --> 00:01:47.400 teacher. He's the man who, in the 13th century, 00:01:47.560 --> 00:01:49.219 looked at the calendar everyone was using and 00:01:49.219 --> 00:01:51.180 said, we are doing this all wrong. He looked 00:01:51.180 --> 00:01:52.939 at how universities taught science and said, 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:55.140 stop just reading the books and start actually 00:01:55.140 --> 00:01:57.400 looking at the world. And he's the friar who 00:01:57.400 --> 00:02:00.019 predicted the automobile, the airplane, and the 00:02:00.019 --> 00:02:02.980 submarine, literally hundreds of years before 00:02:02.980 --> 00:02:05.200 the engine was even a concept. It's an incredible 00:02:05.200 --> 00:02:08.699 contrast. So today, we are unpacking the life 00:02:08.699 --> 00:02:11.120 of Roger Bacon. And the mission for this deep 00:02:11.120 --> 00:02:14.919 dive is to purse the reality from the myth. We 00:02:14.919 --> 00:02:18.180 need to figure out how a devout Franciscan friar, 00:02:18.219 --> 00:02:21.439 a man sworn to poverty and obedience, ended up 00:02:21.439 --> 00:02:24.620 becoming, well, the friend who reads too much 00:02:24.620 --> 00:02:27.500 of the 13th century. It is a fascinating tangle, 00:02:27.520 --> 00:02:29.979 you know. You have a man who is... deeply, deeply 00:02:29.979 --> 00:02:32.439 religious. Yet he's credited as a pioneer of 00:02:32.439 --> 00:02:34.840 the scientific method. Right. He's a friar who 00:02:34.840 --> 00:02:37.520 is supposedly humble, but he goes around publicly 00:02:37.520 --> 00:02:40.599 insulting the smartest people in Europe. And 00:02:40.599 --> 00:02:42.719 he's writing these secret manuscripts for the 00:02:42.719 --> 00:02:45.560 pope. completely behind his orders back. The 00:02:45.560 --> 00:02:47.539 sources we are diving into today are the heavy 00:02:47.539 --> 00:02:49.919 hitters. We've got the historical records of 00:02:49.919 --> 00:02:51.659 his life, the history of the Franciscan order, 00:02:51.759 --> 00:02:54.219 his massive, massive encyclopedia, the opus made 00:02:54.219 --> 00:02:57.280 use, and his frankly desperate letters to Pope 00:02:57.280 --> 00:02:59.379 Clement IV. And I think through these documents, 00:02:59.520 --> 00:03:01.539 we're going to see a man who wasn't trying to 00:03:01.539 --> 00:03:03.419 be a wizard at all. He was trying to save the 00:03:03.419 --> 00:03:05.319 world. So let's start at the beginning. Who was 00:03:05.319 --> 00:03:07.879 this guy before all the legends took over? Right. 00:03:07.919 --> 00:03:12.680 So Roger Bacon was born around 1219, maybe 1220. 00:03:13.240 --> 00:03:14.939 We don't have an exact date, do we? Like a birth 00:03:14.939 --> 00:03:16.800 certificate or anything? No, nothing like that. 00:03:17.060 --> 00:03:19.159 Record keeping back then, well, it wasn't exactly 00:03:19.159 --> 00:03:21.400 digital. But we have a clue from Bacon himself. 00:03:21.780 --> 00:03:24.979 He wrote something in 1267 that helps us pin 00:03:24.979 --> 00:03:27.860 it down. Oh, what does it say? He said, and I'm 00:03:27.860 --> 00:03:30.780 paraphrasing a bit, that 40 years have passed 00:03:30.780 --> 00:03:32.819 since I first learned the alphabet. The alphabet, 00:03:32.979 --> 00:03:37.379 so the alphabet. Learning his ABCs. Well, probably 00:03:37.379 --> 00:03:40.500 a bit more than that. It likely refers to the 00:03:40.500 --> 00:03:43.180 start of his formal education, you know, the 00:03:43.180 --> 00:03:46.759 trivium and quadrivium, the basics of a medieval 00:03:46.759 --> 00:03:49.539 university education. And kids started that when? 00:03:49.879 --> 00:03:52.539 Like in their teenage years? Yeah, around age 00:03:52.539 --> 00:03:54.819 13 was pretty standard. So if you do the math, 00:03:55.000 --> 00:03:59.150 1267 minus 40 years minus another 13. You land 00:03:59.150 --> 00:04:01.729 right around 1220 for his birth year. It's like 00:04:01.729 --> 00:04:04.229 historical detective work. It is. And we know 00:04:04.229 --> 00:04:06.530 he was born near Ilchester in Somerset, England. 00:04:06.849 --> 00:04:09.090 And this next part is a really crucial detail 00:04:09.090 --> 00:04:11.250 that often gets glossed over in the wizard stories. 00:04:11.710 --> 00:04:14.169 His family was wealthy. Okay, so he didn't start 00:04:14.169 --> 00:04:16.430 out as a poor begging friar. He had something 00:04:16.430 --> 00:04:19.230 of a silver spoon. Far from poor, at least in 00:04:19.230 --> 00:04:21.009 the beginning. They were well -off landowners. 00:04:21.250 --> 00:04:24.410 But the political climate of 13th century England 00:04:24.410 --> 00:04:27.480 was... Let's just call it volatile. This was 00:04:27.480 --> 00:04:30.259 the era of King Henry III. I remember this vaguely 00:04:30.259 --> 00:04:32.680 from history class. Yeah. The Barons' War. The 00:04:32.680 --> 00:04:35.120 Second Barons' War, to be precise. Yeah. And 00:04:35.120 --> 00:04:38.339 it was a nasty civil conflict. On one side, you 00:04:38.339 --> 00:04:40.199 had Simon de Montfort leading the rebel barons. 00:04:40.220 --> 00:04:43.680 On the other, you had King Henry III and Bacon's 00:04:43.680 --> 00:04:46.680 family. They were royal partisans. They backed 00:04:46.680 --> 00:04:48.800 the king. And usually you'd think backing the 00:04:48.800 --> 00:04:51.120 king is the safe bet. You'd think so. But in 00:04:51.120 --> 00:04:53.639 this case, it was a very, very expensive loyalty. 00:04:53.959 --> 00:04:56.600 During the war, the rebels seized the Bacon family's 00:04:56.600 --> 00:04:58.959 property. They drove several members of his family 00:04:58.959 --> 00:05:01.939 into exile. Wow. So Roger Bacon grows up in a 00:05:01.939 --> 00:05:04.339 family that sees its fortune completely collapse 00:05:04.339 --> 00:05:07.259 because of war and politics. That context is 00:05:07.259 --> 00:05:09.339 absolutely vital for understanding the rest of 00:05:09.339 --> 00:05:11.519 his life. Why is it so vital? Because later on, 00:05:11.560 --> 00:05:13.779 when he desperately needs money for his research, 00:05:13.920 --> 00:05:16.120 you know, for expensive books, for lenses, for 00:05:16.120 --> 00:05:19.000 lab equipment, all of it, he can't just write 00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:21.910 home to dad for a loan. The bank of mom and dad 00:05:21.910 --> 00:05:24.470 has been shuttered by the revolution. He has 00:05:24.470 --> 00:05:26.629 the taste and ambition of a wealthy scholar, 00:05:26.769 --> 00:05:31.410 but the budget of a pauper. So the family fortune 00:05:31.410 --> 00:05:34.329 is gone. He has to turn to the one thing they 00:05:34.329 --> 00:05:37.970 can't take away from him. His brain. And he goes 00:05:37.970 --> 00:05:41.399 to Oxford. He does. And Oxford in the early 13th 00:05:41.399 --> 00:05:43.480 century was an incredibly exciting place. It 00:05:43.480 --> 00:05:45.500 was just starting to become a real intellectual 00:05:45.500 --> 00:05:48.360 heavyweight in Europe. And the man casting a 00:05:48.360 --> 00:05:51.279 long shadow over Oxford at that time was Robert 00:05:51.279 --> 00:05:53.439 Grossetest. Grossetest. That's a great name. 00:05:53.439 --> 00:05:55.100 It sounds like big head. It roughly translates 00:05:55.100 --> 00:05:57.839 to great head. Yes. And he had a great head on 00:05:57.839 --> 00:06:00.220 his shoulders. Grossetest was a powerhouse. He 00:06:00.220 --> 00:06:02.540 was the Bishop of Lincoln. But before that, he 00:06:02.540 --> 00:06:05.279 was a scholar who really, really pushed for using 00:06:05.279 --> 00:06:07.480 mathematics to understand the natural world. 00:06:07.850 --> 00:06:09.410 So he wasn't just sitting around debating how 00:06:09.410 --> 00:06:11.569 many angels can dance on the head of a pan. No, 00:06:11.709 --> 00:06:14.149 not at all. He was studying light. He had this 00:06:14.149 --> 00:06:16.009 theory that light was the first form of matter. 00:06:16.189 --> 00:06:18.629 He used geometry to explain how the world worked. 00:06:18.829 --> 00:06:21.569 Now, Bacon probably never studied under Grossetest 00:06:21.569 --> 00:06:24.089 directly. Grossetest likely left Oxford before 00:06:24.089 --> 00:06:26.490 Bacon arrived. But Bacon definitely attended 00:06:26.490 --> 00:06:29.050 lectures by scholars who were deeply influenced 00:06:29.050 --> 00:06:32.129 by him. So this idea that math is the language 00:06:32.129 --> 00:06:35.240 of nature. gets embedded in Bacon's brain from 00:06:35.240 --> 00:06:37.579 very early on. Exactly. It's a foundational concept 00:06:37.579 --> 00:06:39.959 for him. And he does very well at Oxford. He 00:06:39.959 --> 00:06:42.500 becomes a master. He lectures on the standard 00:06:42.500 --> 00:06:45.740 stuff, Aristotle, logic, Latin grammar. But he 00:06:45.740 --> 00:06:48.620 also teaches arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, 00:06:48.819 --> 00:06:51.100 the more mathematical arts. He seems to be on 00:06:51.100 --> 00:06:53.259 a pretty standard academic track for a brilliant 00:06:53.259 --> 00:06:56.470 young man. A very successful one. And then sometime 00:06:56.470 --> 00:06:59.649 around 1237, he gets called up to the major leagues. 00:06:59.970 --> 00:07:02.629 He accepts an invitation to teach at the University 00:07:02.629 --> 00:07:05.230 of Paris. The Sorbonne. That's the Ivy League 00:07:05.230 --> 00:07:07.569 of the 13th century. It was the undisputed intellectual 00:07:07.569 --> 00:07:09.410 center of Europe. If you wanted to make a name 00:07:09.410 --> 00:07:11.829 for yourself, you had to go to Paris. But Bacon? 00:07:12.790 --> 00:07:14.670 Well, he didn't exactly fit in with the crowd 00:07:14.670 --> 00:07:17.610 there. Why not? Was he too English? Not enough 00:07:17.610 --> 00:07:21.180 of a philosopher? He was too. Bacon. He was famously 00:07:21.180 --> 00:07:23.660 combative. I mean, you have to understand the 00:07:23.660 --> 00:07:26.439 academic culture in Paris at the time was very 00:07:26.439 --> 00:07:30.379 focused on. what we call scholasticism, analyzing 00:07:30.379 --> 00:07:34.240 texts, debating minute definitions, logical proofs. 00:07:34.240 --> 00:07:35.860 And he thought that was a waste of time. He thought 00:07:35.860 --> 00:07:37.800 a lot of it was nonsense. He thought they were 00:07:37.800 --> 00:07:40.300 intellectually lazy. He constantly criticized 00:07:40.300 --> 00:07:44.579 his contemporaries for relying on bad Latin translations 00:07:44.579 --> 00:07:46.980 of Aristotle without ever checking the original 00:07:46.980 --> 00:07:49.439 Greek or Arabic. He wanted to get back to the 00:07:49.439 --> 00:07:51.720 sources. So he was a purist. A very aggressive 00:07:51.720 --> 00:07:54.480 one. He famously called the reference for another 00:07:54.480 --> 00:07:57.199 incredibly important scholar, Albertus Magnus. 00:07:57.420 --> 00:08:00.879 a monstrosity. Ouch. Albertus Magnus was a huge 00:08:00.879 --> 00:08:02.379 deal, wasn't he? They called him the universal 00:08:02.379 --> 00:08:04.759 doctor. He was probably the most respected intellectual 00:08:04.759 --> 00:08:07.160 in Europe at the time. Calling the respect for 00:08:07.160 --> 00:08:09.779 him a monstrosity is like a junior physics professor 00:08:09.779 --> 00:08:12.079 today saying that respecting Albert Einstein 00:08:12.079 --> 00:08:14.800 is a monstrosity. It was just professional suicide. 00:08:15.060 --> 00:08:16.939 He had a sharp tongue. He was the guy in the 00:08:16.939 --> 00:08:19.360 seminar who would constantly interrupt the professor 00:08:19.360 --> 00:08:21.779 to correct his grammar or his translation. We 00:08:21.779 --> 00:08:24.100 all know that guy. And nobody invites that guy 00:08:24.100 --> 00:08:26.720 to the after party. Exactly. So he was seen as 00:08:26.720 --> 00:08:30.839 eccentric, arrogant, difficult. And then in the 00:08:30.839 --> 00:08:35.360 late 1250s, around 1256 or 57, he makes a decision 00:08:35.360 --> 00:08:37.659 that changes everything. A decision that seems 00:08:37.659 --> 00:08:39.879 completely out of character for an arrogant, 00:08:40.019 --> 00:08:42.639 independent academic. He joins the Franciscan 00:08:42.639 --> 00:08:45.179 order. He becomes a friar. Okay, let's untack 00:08:45.179 --> 00:08:48.259 this. The Franciscans. the order of friars minor 00:08:48.259 --> 00:08:50.759 these are the followers of st francis of assisi 00:08:50.759 --> 00:08:53.539 they are known for absolute poverty for humility 00:08:53.539 --> 00:08:56.259 for strict obedience they beg for their food 00:08:56.259 --> 00:08:59.299 why would a guy who loves expensive books and 00:08:59.299 --> 00:09:01.549 telling everyone they're wrong Join a group like 00:09:01.549 --> 00:09:03.649 that. It's the million dollar question, isn't 00:09:03.649 --> 00:09:05.690 it? Historians have argued about this for centuries. 00:09:05.710 --> 00:09:07.610 Some speculate he did it for purely spiritual 00:09:07.610 --> 00:09:10.049 reasons. Maybe he had a genuine midlife crisis 00:09:10.049 --> 00:09:12.750 or a deep religious conversion. There was a lot 00:09:12.750 --> 00:09:14.970 of religious fervor at the time. Maybe he felt 00:09:14.970 --> 00:09:17.169 guilty about his arrogance and wanted to atone 00:09:17.169 --> 00:09:19.409 for it. That's certainly possible. Or it could 00:09:19.409 --> 00:09:21.629 have been practical. A bit more cynical. How 00:09:21.629 --> 00:09:24.789 so? Remember the money problem? His family is 00:09:24.789 --> 00:09:27.340 ruined. The life of an independent scholar is 00:09:27.340 --> 00:09:30.299 incredibly expensive. You need to buy books, 00:09:30.460 --> 00:09:33.600 parchment, pay for lodging. If you're a friar, 00:09:33.600 --> 00:09:35.340 you don't have to worry about rent or food. The 00:09:35.340 --> 00:09:37.740 order takes care of you. It's a form of institutional 00:09:37.740 --> 00:09:40.720 support. But he traded rent for freedom. And 00:09:40.720 --> 00:09:43.179 he seems to have made a terrible trade if his 00:09:43.179 --> 00:09:46.039 goal was academic freedom. Because shortly after 00:09:46.039 --> 00:09:49.159 he joins, the Franciscans undergo a major internal 00:09:49.159 --> 00:09:52.779 crackdown. Around the year 1260, the order passed 00:09:52.779 --> 00:09:55.600 a statute that explicitly prohibited friars from 00:09:55.600 --> 00:09:58.080 publishing books or pamphlets without prior approval 00:09:58.080 --> 00:10:00.159 from their superiors. That is a writer's nightmare. 00:10:00.399 --> 00:10:02.960 Total censorship. And it gets worse for him personally. 00:10:03.120 --> 00:10:05.539 It seems Bacon was, unsurprisingly, a bit of 00:10:05.539 --> 00:10:07.980 a troublemaker within the order, too. There's 00:10:07.980 --> 00:10:10.340 evidence to suggest he was assigned menial tasks 00:10:10.340 --> 00:10:12.960 specifically to keep him humble and limit his 00:10:12.960 --> 00:10:15.860 time for contemplation. So they've got this genius 00:10:15.860 --> 00:10:18.860 level intellect and they have him scrubbing floors. 00:10:19.279 --> 00:10:21.759 Scrubbing floors, peeling vegetables, who knows. 00:10:22.600 --> 00:10:24.899 Bacon later described this period of his life 00:10:24.899 --> 00:10:29.289 as an enforced absence from scholarly life. He 00:10:29.289 --> 00:10:31.610 felt like he was being buried alive. He's surrounded 00:10:31.610 --> 00:10:33.710 by people he thinks are intellectually inferior, 00:10:33.909 --> 00:10:36.429 and he's forbidden from writing down his groundbreaking 00:10:36.429 --> 00:10:39.070 ideas. He must have been absolutely climbing 00:10:39.070 --> 00:10:41.830 the walls. Desperate is the word he uses. He 00:10:41.830 --> 00:10:44.809 was desperate. But Roger Bacon doesn't give up. 00:10:45.090 --> 00:10:48.830 He hatches a plan. He needs a patron. Someone 00:10:48.830 --> 00:10:51.929 powerful enough to override his own Franciscan 00:10:51.929 --> 00:10:54.230 superiors. And in the medieval world, there is 00:10:54.230 --> 00:10:56.470 really only one person who fits that bill. The 00:10:56.470 --> 00:10:59.240 Pope. Or in this case, a man who was about to 00:10:59.240 --> 00:11:01.919 become the pope. Bacon manages, through a network 00:11:01.919 --> 00:11:04.299 of contacts, to get in touch with Cardinal Guy 00:11:04.299 --> 00:11:07.340 de Foucault. At the time, Guy was a papal legate, 00:11:07.419 --> 00:11:09.720 basically a high -ranking diplomat serving in 00:11:09.720 --> 00:11:12.740 England. How does a lowly, floor -scrubbing friar 00:11:12.740 --> 00:11:15.200 even get a message to a cardinal? With great 00:11:15.200 --> 00:11:17.679 difficulty. And this is where it leads to a complete 00:11:17.679 --> 00:11:20.580 comedy of errors. Bacon sends a messenger, a 00:11:20.580 --> 00:11:22.879 man named Raymond of Lyon, to speak to Guy de 00:11:22.879 --> 00:11:24.700 Foucault on his behalf. But the message gets 00:11:24.700 --> 00:11:27.129 completely garbled in translation. The classic 00:11:27.129 --> 00:11:30.029 game of telephone. Exactly. Raymond, for whatever 00:11:30.029 --> 00:11:33.289 reason, miscommunicates Bacon's proposal. Guy 00:11:33.289 --> 00:11:35.269 de Fouque gets the impression that Bacon has 00:11:35.269 --> 00:11:38.049 already written a magnificent encyclopedia of 00:11:38.049 --> 00:11:40.809 all science. He thinks this great book already 00:11:40.809 --> 00:11:43.750 exists, that it's sitting on Bacon's desk, and 00:11:43.750 --> 00:11:45.950 that Bacon is just waiting for permission to 00:11:45.950 --> 00:11:48.470 send it. But the book doesn't exist. Not even 00:11:48.470 --> 00:11:51.070 a first draft. It exists only in Bacon's head. 00:11:51.480 --> 00:11:54.600 He was asking for funding to write it. Guy thought 00:11:54.600 --> 00:11:56.720 he was being offered a finished product. It's 00:11:56.720 --> 00:11:59.419 a huge misunderstanding. And then the stakes 00:11:59.419 --> 00:12:03.100 go through the roof. Dramatically. In 1265, Guy 00:12:03.100 --> 00:12:06.019 de Fouque is elected pope. He becomes Pope Clement 00:12:06.019 --> 00:12:08.379 IV. So now the guy who thinks you have a finished 00:12:08.379 --> 00:12:10.500 copy of The Secrets of the Universe is the most 00:12:10.500 --> 00:12:12.919 powerful man in the Western world. And he wants 00:12:12.919 --> 00:12:17.340 his book. On June 22, 1266, the new pope sends 00:12:17.340 --> 00:12:20.490 a letter directly to Bacon. He officially commissions 00:12:20.490 --> 00:12:22.610 him to write out his remedies for the current 00:12:22.610 --> 00:12:24.789 conditions of the world, for the state of education, 00:12:25.029 --> 00:12:29.070 for everything. But there is a catch, a massive 00:12:29.070 --> 00:12:31.789 catch. What's the catch? The pope writes that 00:12:31.789 --> 00:12:35.950 Bacon must do this in utmost secrecy. And this 00:12:35.950 --> 00:12:38.509 is the crucial part. He must not violate any 00:12:38.509 --> 00:12:40.809 standing prohibitions of his order. Wait a minute. 00:12:40.850 --> 00:12:42.929 So the order says you are forbidden from writing 00:12:42.929 --> 00:12:46.289 books. And the pope says, write me a book. But 00:12:46.289 --> 00:12:48.710 don't tell the order you're writing it. And also, 00:12:48.750 --> 00:12:51.710 don't break the rules of the order. That's impossible. 00:12:52.070 --> 00:12:54.230 It's a contradiction. It's a paradox. It put 00:12:54.230 --> 00:12:58.049 Bacon in an absolutely terrible bind. If he tells 00:12:58.049 --> 00:13:00.690 his superiors, hey, the pope asked me to do this, 00:13:00.730 --> 00:13:03.389 he's breaking the pope's direct command for secrecy. 00:13:03.450 --> 00:13:06.250 If he writes the book without telling them, he's 00:13:06.250 --> 00:13:09.250 disobeying his order's ban on publishing. It's 00:13:09.250 --> 00:13:11.149 a catch -22. And we haven't even mentioned the 00:13:11.149 --> 00:13:13.590 money problem again. Exactly. Parchment isn't 00:13:13.590 --> 00:13:16.480 cheap. ink professional copyists to make a clean 00:13:16.480 --> 00:13:18.960 version for the Pope, these things were incredibly 00:13:18.960 --> 00:13:21.620 expensive in the 13th century. It's like being 00:13:21.620 --> 00:13:23.379 asked to build a rocket ship in your basement 00:13:23.379 --> 00:13:25.620 without telling your spouse and with a budget 00:13:25.620 --> 00:13:27.559 of zero dollars. So what does he do? Does he 00:13:27.559 --> 00:13:29.899 just give up and write back saying, sorry, can't 00:13:29.899 --> 00:13:33.879 be done? No. He panics. And then he works harder 00:13:33.879 --> 00:13:35.799 than perhaps anyone has ever worked in a single 00:13:35.799 --> 00:13:38.399 year. He begs and borrows money from friends. 00:13:38.600 --> 00:13:41.620 He finds sympathetic ears. And in about a year, 00:13:41.659 --> 00:13:46.419 from 1267 to 1268, Bacon produces a staggering 00:13:46.419 --> 00:13:49.419 amount of material. He writes the Opus Majeuse. 00:13:49.769 --> 00:13:52.210 the greater work and this isn't some little pamphlet 00:13:52.210 --> 00:13:54.990 this is a doorstopper of a book it's around a 00:13:54.990 --> 00:13:57.210 million words it's an encyclopedia covering grammar 00:13:57.210 --> 00:14:00.509 logic mathematics physics experimental science 00:14:00.509 --> 00:14:03.870 optics alchemy and moral philosophy a million 00:14:03.870 --> 00:14:08.409 words in a single year by hand with a quill that's 00:14:08.409 --> 00:14:11.330 that's insane it's a practically manic level 00:14:11.330 --> 00:14:13.450 of production and just in case that one got lost 00:14:13.450 --> 00:14:15.470 in the mail because you know the medieval mail 00:14:15.470 --> 00:14:17.549 system was about as reliable as a coin toss he 00:14:17.549 --> 00:14:20.159 also wrote the opus minus the lesser work, and 00:14:20.159 --> 00:14:22.340 the Opus Tertium, the third work, as summaries 00:14:22.340 --> 00:14:24.379 and expansions to be sent along with it. He was 00:14:24.379 --> 00:14:27.059 hedging his bets, sending backups. It has been 00:14:27.059 --> 00:14:29.220 called one of the most remarkable single efforts 00:14:29.220 --> 00:14:31.980 of literary productivity in history. He was literally 00:14:31.980 --> 00:14:34.340 writing for his life, for his chance to get out 00:14:34.340 --> 00:14:36.759 of obscurity. So let's dive into the book itself, 00:14:37.080 --> 00:14:41.080 the Opus Majus. What was he actually trying to 00:14:41.080 --> 00:14:43.860 say in this million word play? Was it just a 00:14:43.860 --> 00:14:46.419 data dump of everything he knew? No, not at all. 00:14:46.440 --> 00:14:48.759 It was a manifesto. He called it a persuasive 00:14:48.759 --> 00:14:52.080 preamble. Bacon wanted nothing less than to completely 00:14:52.080 --> 00:14:54.600 reform the educational system of Christendom. 00:14:54.799 --> 00:14:57.120 He believed the church was in danger because 00:14:57.120 --> 00:14:59.659 its scholars were intellectually lazy and ignorant. 00:14:59.960 --> 00:15:02.120 So it starts with a critique. Start to the bang. 00:15:02.279 --> 00:15:05.220 Part one is titled The Causes of Human Ignorance. 00:15:05.320 --> 00:15:07.840 I love that. He starts by telling everyone why 00:15:07.840 --> 00:15:10.860 they're stupid. It's so perfectly on brand for 00:15:10.860 --> 00:15:13.899 Roger Bacon. It is. He identifies four main causes 00:15:13.899 --> 00:15:16.539 of error that hold humanity back. The first is 00:15:16.539 --> 00:15:19.059 submission to unworthy authority. The second 00:15:19.059 --> 00:15:21.559 is the influence of custom. Third is popular 00:15:21.559 --> 00:15:24.080 prejudice. And the fourth, which he thinks is 00:15:24.080 --> 00:15:26.159 the worst one, is the concealment of our own 00:15:26.159 --> 00:15:28.720 ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display 00:15:28.720 --> 00:15:31.200 of our knowledge. Concealment of ignorance with 00:15:31.200 --> 00:15:33.759 ostentatious display of knowledge. That sounds 00:15:33.759 --> 00:15:36.620 like he predicted social media by about 750 years. 00:15:37.129 --> 00:15:39.309 It is a timeless critique, isn't it? He's saying, 00:15:39.429 --> 00:15:42.009 we pretend we know everything so we stop actually 00:15:42.009 --> 00:15:45.330 learning anything. But The real core of his argument, 00:15:45.409 --> 00:15:47.409 the revolutionary part, was about how we learn. 00:15:47.629 --> 00:15:49.950 He placed a huge emphasis on what he called, 00:15:50.029 --> 00:15:55.690 This is the line that gets him the title of the 00:15:55.690 --> 00:15:58.309 first modern scientist, right? It is, but we 00:15:58.309 --> 00:16:00.490 have to be very careful with that label. When 00:16:00.490 --> 00:16:03.070 Bacon talks about experience, he doesn't just 00:16:03.070 --> 00:16:05.490 mean a double -blind lab experiment like we would 00:16:05.490 --> 00:16:08.730 today. For him, experience had two parts. One 00:16:08.730 --> 00:16:11.210 was sensory experience, observing the world with 00:16:11.210 --> 00:16:13.750 your eyes, measuring things. The part we call 00:16:13.750 --> 00:16:16.610 science. Yes. But the other part was interior 00:16:16.610 --> 00:16:18.909 illumination, a kind of spiritual experience 00:16:18.909 --> 00:16:21.470 or divine revelation. So it's a blend of faith 00:16:21.470 --> 00:16:23.570 and observation. He's not an atheist scientist 00:16:23.570 --> 00:16:26.190 in a lab coat by any stretch. Not at all. He's 00:16:26.190 --> 00:16:28.409 a Franciscan friar trying to find God's truth, 00:16:28.490 --> 00:16:30.950 which he believes is revealed in two books, the 00:16:30.950 --> 00:16:33.779 Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. But 00:16:33.779 --> 00:16:36.200 compared to his peers, who were mostly just arguing 00:16:36.200 --> 00:16:38.720 about what Aristotle meant in paragraph 4 of 00:16:38.720 --> 00:16:42.440 page 10, Bacon was radical. He said theories 00:16:42.440 --> 00:16:44.759 supplied by reason must be verified by sensory 00:16:44.759 --> 00:16:47.340 data. You can't just argue about it. You have 00:16:47.340 --> 00:16:49.840 to go look. Can you give us a concrete example 00:16:49.840 --> 00:16:52.480 of how he applied this? Optics is the absolute 00:16:52.480 --> 00:16:56.139 best example. He called it perspectiva. Bacon 00:16:56.139 --> 00:16:58.860 was obsessed with light, which ties back to Grossetest. 00:16:59.120 --> 00:17:01.879 And he draws heavily and gives credit to the 00:17:01.879 --> 00:17:04.740 work of the great Islamic scientist Ibn al -Haytham, 00:17:04.880 --> 00:17:07.660 known in the West as al -Hazen. The Islamic Golden 00:17:07.660 --> 00:17:10.059 Age was really the source of so much of this 00:17:10.059 --> 00:17:12.400 knowledge, wasn't it? Absolutely. And Bacon was 00:17:12.400 --> 00:17:14.579 one of the few European scholars of his time 00:17:14.579 --> 00:17:16.900 who really recognized and celebrated that fact. 00:17:17.059 --> 00:17:19.980 He praised Islamic thinkers constantly. So he 00:17:19.980 --> 00:17:21.819 studied the anatomy of the eye, the structure 00:17:21.819 --> 00:17:24.259 of the brain, and the properties of light reflection. 00:17:24.910 --> 00:17:27.150 And crucially, refraction. Refraction is how 00:17:27.150 --> 00:17:29.029 light bends, right? Like when you look at a straw 00:17:29.029 --> 00:17:31.809 in a glass of water and it looks broken. Exactly. 00:17:32.470 --> 00:17:35.230 Bacon experimented with how light bends when 00:17:35.230 --> 00:17:37.890 it passes through glass lenses. And this led 00:17:37.890 --> 00:17:41.180 him to a huge insight. He realized that you could 00:17:41.180 --> 00:17:43.779 use carefully shaped lenses to make small things 00:17:43.779 --> 00:17:46.599 look big or to make distant things look close. 00:17:46.960 --> 00:17:49.680 He wrote, and this is an amazing quote, from 00:17:49.680 --> 00:17:52.420 an incredible distance, we may read the smallest 00:17:52.420 --> 00:17:54.640 letters. He's literally describing the telescope 00:17:54.640 --> 00:17:57.039 in the microscope. He's describing the principle, 00:17:57.259 --> 00:18:00.039 yes. We have no evidence that he actually built 00:18:00.039 --> 00:18:02.299 a working telescope, but he understood exactly 00:18:02.299 --> 00:18:05.079 how it would work. He even suggested that lenses 00:18:05.079 --> 00:18:08.019 could be used to help old men read. He's describing 00:18:08.019 --> 00:18:10.700 reading glasses. And this work was so influential 00:18:10.700 --> 00:18:13.160 that he's considered partially responsible for 00:18:13.160 --> 00:18:15.180 getting optics added to the medieval university 00:18:15.180 --> 00:18:17.960 curriculum. So he's not just a theorist, he's 00:18:17.960 --> 00:18:19.900 a curriculum reformer. That was his ultimate 00:18:19.900 --> 00:18:22.500 goal. He argued that God created light as the 00:18:22.500 --> 00:18:24.940 primary way he acts in the world. So studying 00:18:24.940 --> 00:18:27.720 light was, for Bacon, a way of studying God's 00:18:27.720 --> 00:18:30.099 divine action. It was a form of worship. And 00:18:30.099 --> 00:18:32.160 he applied this same, you know, mathematical 00:18:32.160 --> 00:18:34.700 observational rigor to other things too. What 00:18:34.700 --> 00:18:37.619 about the calendar? Oh, the calendar was a major 00:18:37.619 --> 00:18:40.460 source of frustration for him. He looked at the 00:18:40.460 --> 00:18:42.480 Julian calendar, the one everyone in Europe was 00:18:42.480 --> 00:18:44.960 using, established by Julius Caesar, and he called 00:18:44.960 --> 00:18:48.359 it intolerable, horrible, and laughable. Laughable. 00:18:48.920 --> 00:18:51.460 Those are strong words for a calendar. What was 00:18:51.460 --> 00:18:53.599 so funny about it to him? The math was wrong. 00:18:53.740 --> 00:18:55.859 The Julian calendar assumed that the year was 00:18:55.859 --> 00:18:59.779 exactly 365 .25 days long. That's why we have 00:18:59.779 --> 00:19:02.960 a leap year every four years. But Bacon, relying 00:19:02.960 --> 00:19:06.700 on more precise Arabic astronomical data, realized 00:19:06.700 --> 00:19:08.880 the year is slightly less than that. It's about 00:19:08.880 --> 00:19:11.220 11 minutes shorter. 11 minutes a year doesn't 00:19:11.220 --> 00:19:13.099 seem like a lot. It doesn't, but it adds up. 00:19:13.180 --> 00:19:15.460 After 100 years, you're off by almost a day. 00:19:15.559 --> 00:19:17.700 After 1 ,000 years, you're off by more than a 00:19:17.700 --> 00:19:20.849 week. Bacon calculated that because of this cumulative 00:19:20.849 --> 00:19:23.410 error, the spring equinox, and therefore the 00:19:23.410 --> 00:19:26.230 date of Easter, had shifted by nine full days 00:19:26.230 --> 00:19:29.910 since the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. And for 00:19:29.910 --> 00:19:32.150 a medieval Christian, celebrating Easter on the 00:19:32.150 --> 00:19:34.809 wrong day is not a minor inconvenience. It's 00:19:34.809 --> 00:19:37.289 a huge deal. It's a massive theological problem. 00:19:37.609 --> 00:19:40.150 You are missing the holiest appointment of the 00:19:40.150 --> 00:19:42.730 entire year. You're fasting when you should be 00:19:42.730 --> 00:19:44.609 feasting. You're feasting when you should be 00:19:44.609 --> 00:19:48.289 fasting. The entire sacred rhythm is off. So 00:19:48.289 --> 00:19:51.190 Bacon proposed a solution. What was it? He said 00:19:51.190 --> 00:19:53.569 we should drop one day from the calendar every 00:19:53.569 --> 00:19:57.009 125 years to correct the drift and stop relying 00:19:57.009 --> 00:19:59.849 on a fixed date for the equinox and instead rely 00:19:59.849 --> 00:20:03.450 on actual astronomical observation. That sounds 00:20:03.450 --> 00:20:06.569 remarkably accurate. It's extremely accurate. 00:20:06.789 --> 00:20:10.349 But did the Pope listen? Let me guess. The proposal 00:20:10.349 --> 00:20:13.190 got filed away in a dusty Vatican drawer. While 00:20:13.190 --> 00:20:15.890 Pope Clement IV might have listened, he was an 00:20:15.890 --> 00:20:18.690 intelligent man. But, spoiler alert, he died 00:20:18.690 --> 00:20:21.309 before he could act on it. A reform very, very 00:20:21.309 --> 00:20:23.470 similar to Bacon's, the Gregorian calendar, the 00:20:23.470 --> 00:20:26.490 one we all use today, wasn't enacted until 1582. 00:20:26.750 --> 00:20:28.509 So he was over 300 years ahead of the curve. 00:20:28.670 --> 00:20:31.029 Three centuries ahead. It's the tragedy of his 00:20:31.029 --> 00:20:32.990 life in a nutshell. He's standing on a rooftop 00:20:32.990 --> 00:20:34.970 yelling the right answer, but nobody down on 00:20:34.970 --> 00:20:36.410 the street is ready to hear it yet. It's a recurring 00:20:36.410 --> 00:20:39.549 theme. But let's move to the stuff that really 00:20:39.549 --> 00:20:42.710 cemented his reputation as a wizard. Let's talk 00:20:42.710 --> 00:20:46.660 about gunpowder. Yes, the explosions. Bacon is 00:20:46.660 --> 00:20:49.380 often cited, correctly, as the first European 00:20:49.380 --> 00:20:52.799 to record the formula for gunpowder. He didn't 00:20:52.799 --> 00:20:54.880 invent it, right? No, absolutely not. He didn't 00:20:54.880 --> 00:20:57.859 invent it. Gunpowder was invented in China centuries 00:20:57.859 --> 00:21:00.740 earlier. Knowledge of it had likely traveled 00:21:00.740 --> 00:21:03.299 along the Silk Road or via the expanding Mongol 00:21:03.299 --> 00:21:06.579 Empire. In fact, Bacon had a friend, a fellow 00:21:06.579 --> 00:21:09.480 Franciscan named William of Rubruck, who had 00:21:09.480 --> 00:21:11.579 actually traveled to the Mongol court and returned. 00:21:11.859 --> 00:21:13.680 So he probably got the intel from a traveler's 00:21:13.680 --> 00:21:16.319 tale. It's the most likely source, yes. He heard 00:21:16.319 --> 00:21:18.740 about this strange exploding powder from the 00:21:18.740 --> 00:21:21.480 east. But Bacon wasn't just a reporter. He was 00:21:21.480 --> 00:21:24.319 a scientist. He figured out what it was. In the 00:21:24.319 --> 00:21:27.160 Opus Majus and the Opus Tertium, he describes 00:21:27.160 --> 00:21:29.759 a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal. 00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:32.099 And he described it as a toy, didn't he? He did. 00:21:32.240 --> 00:21:34.900 He says it's a children's toy made in many parts 00:21:34.900 --> 00:21:37.160 of the world, about the size of a person's thumb. 00:21:37.359 --> 00:21:40.640 He's describing a firecracker. Exactly. He writes 00:21:40.640 --> 00:21:42.960 that when it bursts, it makes a horrible sound 00:21:42.960 --> 00:21:46.019 and brilliant lightning. He says it exceeds the 00:21:46.019 --> 00:21:48.740 roar of strong thunder. He perfectly captures 00:21:48.740 --> 00:21:51.529 the experience of a firecracker going off. But 00:21:51.529 --> 00:21:53.809 he saw past the Tor aspect of it, didn't he? 00:21:53.849 --> 00:21:55.690 He saw the military potential. He absolutely 00:21:55.690 --> 00:21:58.589 did. He wrote that if you used a larger quantity 00:21:58.589 --> 00:22:01.069 of the powder and enclosed it in a container 00:22:01.069 --> 00:22:03.430 made of a solid material, the force would be 00:22:03.430 --> 00:22:06.730 devastating. He foresaw the cannon. He realized 00:22:06.730 --> 00:22:09.309 that this chemical reaction could destroy entire 00:22:09.309 --> 00:22:11.690 armies from a distance. Now, there's a story 00:22:11.690 --> 00:22:14.869 I've heard about a secret code that Bacon hid 00:22:14.869 --> 00:22:17.750 the true recipe in an anagram or a cryptogram 00:22:17.750 --> 00:22:20.529 because it was too dangerous. Ah, the famous 00:22:20.529 --> 00:22:24.089 cryptogram. This is a bit of a historical wild 00:22:24.089 --> 00:22:26.490 goose chase that really added to the wizard myth. 00:22:26.670 --> 00:22:29.009 In the early 20th century, a British artillery 00:22:29.009 --> 00:22:32.069 officer named Henry Heim published a book where 00:22:32.069 --> 00:22:34.170 he claimed he'd cracked a cipher in one of Bacon's 00:22:34.170 --> 00:22:36.390 letters. He said this. Scrambled letters spelled 00:22:36.390 --> 00:22:39.329 out the perfect ratio for military -grade gunpowder. 00:22:39.509 --> 00:22:42.769 Seven parts saltpeter, five parts charcoal, five 00:22:42.769 --> 00:22:44.650 parts sulfur. That makes him sound like a spy, 00:22:44.849 --> 00:22:46.670 something out of the Da Vinci Code. It does. 00:22:46.750 --> 00:22:49.190 It's a great story. But sadly, it's not true. 00:22:49.960 --> 00:22:53.039 Later historians, particularly Lynn Thorndyke 00:22:53.039 --> 00:22:55.819 and Joseph Needham, completely tore that theory 00:22:55.819 --> 00:22:58.200 apart. They showed that the passage Haim was 00:22:58.200 --> 00:23:00.519 decoding wasn't even written by Bacon. It was 00:23:00.519 --> 00:23:03.920 a later interpolation added by a copyist. And 00:23:03.920 --> 00:23:06.900 the recipe itself? The ratio Haim decoded. It 00:23:06.900 --> 00:23:08.799 wouldn't explode properly. It would just make 00:23:08.799 --> 00:23:11.859 a lot of smoke and maybe a fizzle. It wasn't 00:23:11.859 --> 00:23:15.410 the recipe for high -grade gunpowder. So the 00:23:15.410 --> 00:23:17.589 evidence is that Bacon was actually quite open 00:23:17.589 --> 00:23:20.230 about the ingredients, but he didn't hide some 00:23:20.230 --> 00:23:22.509 secret perfect recipe in a puzzle. That's just 00:23:22.509 --> 00:23:24.369 part of the legend. But he did write about some 00:23:24.369 --> 00:23:25.970 other crazy machines. Yeah. This is stuff that 00:23:25.970 --> 00:23:27.230 sounds like it's straight out of science fiction. 00:23:27.430 --> 00:23:30.329 Yes. In a letter called Epistola de Secretus, 00:23:30.369 --> 00:23:32.990 his letter on secret works, he really lets his 00:23:32.990 --> 00:23:35.609 imagination run wild. He starts predicting technologies 00:23:35.609 --> 00:23:38.569 based on his understanding of mechanics. He predicts 00:23:38.569 --> 00:23:41.210 cars that can move with inestimable force without 00:23:41.210 --> 00:23:43.190 any draft animals pulling them. Self -driving 00:23:43.190 --> 00:23:45.779 cars. Yeah. or at the very least, horseless carriages. 00:23:45.900 --> 00:23:47.940 He predicts ships that can be steered by a single 00:23:47.940 --> 00:23:50.420 man and move faster than a galley full of rowers. 00:23:51.059 --> 00:23:55.099 Speedboats. In the 13th century. And, most famously, 00:23:55.319 --> 00:23:58.299 flying machines. He describes a machine where 00:23:58.299 --> 00:24:00.859 a man sits in the middle, turning some kind of 00:24:00.859 --> 00:24:03.579 device or crank that makes artificial wings beat 00:24:03.579 --> 00:24:06.759 the air in the manner of a flying bird. An ornithopter. 00:24:07.630 --> 00:24:09.950 Just like da Vinci's sketches from centuries 00:24:09.950 --> 00:24:12.910 later. And even submarines. He references ancient 00:24:12.910 --> 00:24:15.170 stories about Alexander the Great using diving 00:24:15.170 --> 00:24:18.049 bells or suits to walk on the ocean floor. And 00:24:18.049 --> 00:24:20.549 he argues that such devices are mechanically 00:24:20.549 --> 00:24:24.430 possible. Now, to be clear, did he have blueprints 00:24:24.430 --> 00:24:26.950 for these? Did he have a secret workshop where 00:24:26.950 --> 00:24:29.329 he was building a helicopter prototype? No, not 00:24:29.329 --> 00:24:31.250 at all. These were speculative. They were thought 00:24:31.250 --> 00:24:33.549 experiments. He was arguing from principle. He 00:24:33.549 --> 00:24:35.940 was saying, look. Nature has forces. Art, and 00:24:35.940 --> 00:24:38.279 by art he means engineering and technology, can 00:24:38.279 --> 00:24:41.079 harness those forces. If we understand the laws 00:24:41.079 --> 00:24:43.200 of mechanics, then these things are possible. 00:24:43.420 --> 00:24:45.859 That is a huge mental leap, though. Most people 00:24:45.859 --> 00:24:47.460 in the 13th century would look at a bird and 00:24:47.460 --> 00:24:50.660 say, God made it fly. It's a miracle. Bacon looked 00:24:50.660 --> 00:24:53.289 at a bird and said, it's a machine. If I can 00:24:53.289 --> 00:24:55.049 build a machine that pushes air the same way, 00:24:55.130 --> 00:24:57.589 I can fly too. It's the birth of the mechanical 00:24:57.589 --> 00:25:00.609 worldview. He's moving away from explaining things 00:25:00.609 --> 00:25:03.930 as just magic and toward explaining them as mechanics. 00:25:04.349 --> 00:25:07.250 But he wasn't purely a nuts and bolts guy. We 00:25:07.250 --> 00:25:09.430 have to talk about the more esoteric side of 00:25:09.430 --> 00:25:12.430 his work. Linguistics and alchemy seem to sit 00:25:12.430 --> 00:25:16.230 weirdly next to all this science. And for Bacon, 00:25:16.390 --> 00:25:18.650 they weren't weird at all. They were just as 00:25:18.650 --> 00:25:20.809 important as the machines, maybe even more so. 00:25:21.440 --> 00:25:24.740 Let's look at linguistics first. Bacon was obsessed 00:25:24.740 --> 00:25:27.039 with the idea that the Bible and the works of 00:25:27.039 --> 00:25:29.220 Aristotle were being corrupted by generations 00:25:29.220 --> 00:25:32.619 of bad translations. The classic lost in translation 00:25:32.619 --> 00:25:35.660 problem. He believed it was a crisis. He advocated 00:25:35.660 --> 00:25:37.740 that theologians and philosophers absolutely 00:25:37.740 --> 00:25:40.539 needed to learn the original languages, Hebrew 00:25:40.539 --> 00:25:43.019 and Greek for the Bible, and Arabic for the best 00:25:43.019 --> 00:25:46.160 scientific and philosophical texts. He even went 00:25:46.160 --> 00:25:48.960 so far as to write his own Greek and Hebrew grammars 00:25:48.960 --> 00:25:51.470 to help people learn. He wanted scholars to be 00:25:51.470 --> 00:25:53.589 able to read the source code, so to speak. That's 00:25:53.589 --> 00:25:55.569 a perfect way to put it. And this led him to 00:25:55.569 --> 00:25:57.869 this incredible theory about universal grammar. 00:25:58.109 --> 00:26:00.970 He said, quote, grammar is one in the same in 00:26:00.970 --> 00:26:03.609 all languages, substantially, though it may vary 00:26:03.609 --> 00:26:06.930 accidentally. Meaning that deep down, all human 00:26:06.930 --> 00:26:10.049 languages share a common DNA, a common structure. 00:26:10.349 --> 00:26:13.809 Which is a profoundly modern idea. Noam Chomsky 00:26:13.809 --> 00:26:16.089 would be nodding right along with that. Bacon 00:26:16.089 --> 00:26:18.329 was trying to find the underlying theoretical 00:26:18.329 --> 00:26:21.950 structure of communication itself. Okay, so linguistics 00:26:21.950 --> 00:26:24.390 I can see fitting in. Yeah. But what about alchemy? 00:26:24.789 --> 00:26:28.089 That feels like it contradicts the science. We 00:26:28.089 --> 00:26:30.930 tend to think of alchemy as, you know, greedy 00:26:30.930 --> 00:26:33.509 con artists in pointy hats trying to turn lead 00:26:33.509 --> 00:26:37.809 into gold. To us, yes. To him, no. For a medieval 00:26:37.809 --> 00:26:40.130 thinker like Bacon, alchemy was the pinnacle 00:26:40.130 --> 00:26:42.450 of natural science. It was the science of transformation. 00:26:43.049 --> 00:26:45.289 He followed the common Arabian theory that all 00:26:45.289 --> 00:26:47.950 metals are made of two primary components, mercury 00:26:47.950 --> 00:26:50.289 and sulfur, mixed in different proportions and 00:26:50.289 --> 00:26:52.809 purities. So gold is just lead, but with a better, 00:26:52.849 --> 00:26:55.230 pure balance of ingredients. Exactly. And if 00:26:55.230 --> 00:26:57.349 you could figure out how to purify the base ingredients 00:26:57.349 --> 00:26:59.710 in lead and rebalance them, you could transmute 00:26:59.710 --> 00:27:02.400 it into gold. But for Bacon, this was never just 00:27:02.400 --> 00:27:04.559 about getting rich. It was deeply spiritual. 00:27:04.920 --> 00:27:07.519 How so? He believed in what he called sepientia 00:27:07.519 --> 00:27:10.099 divine wisdom. And he thought that the physical 00:27:10.099 --> 00:27:13.880 process of purifying metals in a lab was analogous 00:27:13.880 --> 00:27:16.380 to the spiritual process of purifying the human 00:27:16.380 --> 00:27:19.500 soul. The alchemist was participating in God's 00:27:19.500 --> 00:27:22.119 creative and perfecting work. So the alchemist 00:27:22.119 --> 00:27:24.539 is like a priest of nature. In a way, yes. This 00:27:24.539 --> 00:27:27.000 all ties into another text he was obsessed with, 00:27:27.099 --> 00:27:29.819 a book called The Secret of Secrets. Bacon believed... 00:27:29.839 --> 00:27:32.460 it was a lost book written by Aristotle for his 00:27:32.460 --> 00:27:34.720 student, Alexander the Great. But it wasn't. 00:27:34.740 --> 00:27:37.000 It wasn't. It was actually an Islamic mirror 00:27:37.000 --> 00:27:39.980 of princes, a kind of political advice manual 00:27:39.980 --> 00:27:42.859 on how to be a good ruler. But because Bacon 00:27:42.859 --> 00:27:45.400 thought it was from Aristotle. He took its advice 00:27:45.400 --> 00:27:47.940 very seriously, and it influenced his belief 00:27:47.940 --> 00:27:49.940 that the state, the church, and the crown should 00:27:49.940 --> 00:27:52.559 be using science and alchemy to govern more effectively 00:27:52.559 --> 00:27:55.319 and to protect itself. So he writes this massive 00:27:55.319 --> 00:27:57.740 work, the Opus Majusis. He pulls it all together. 00:27:57.819 --> 00:27:59.960 He sends it off to the pope. He includes the 00:27:59.960 --> 00:28:02.259 gunpowder, the optics, the calendar reform, the 00:28:02.259 --> 00:28:04.740 grammar, the alchemy. He ships it off to Rome 00:28:04.740 --> 00:28:08.009 in 1268. He is betting his entire career, his 00:28:08.009 --> 00:28:10.210 entire life on this manuscript. What happens? 00:28:10.329 --> 00:28:12.509 Disaster. Absolute disaster. Don't tell me the 00:28:12.509 --> 00:28:14.230 ship sank and it's at the bottom of the Mediterranean. 00:28:14.529 --> 00:28:17.990 Worse. The book arrived safely, but the Pope 00:28:17.990 --> 00:28:22.759 died. Clement IV died in November of 1268, probably 00:28:22.759 --> 00:28:24.980 before he ever had a chance to read Bacon's work 00:28:24.980 --> 00:28:27.259 in any detail. Oh, that is just heartbreaking 00:28:27.259 --> 00:28:30.539 after all that work. It really is. Bacon lost 00:28:30.539 --> 00:28:33.759 his only protector, the one man in the world 00:28:33.759 --> 00:28:36.099 who had the authority to implement these reforms, 00:28:36.359 --> 00:28:39.059 the one man who had authorized Bacon to break 00:28:39.059 --> 00:28:42.450 the rules of his order. was gone and bacon is 00:28:42.450 --> 00:28:44.809 left completely exposed he's a friar who has 00:28:44.809 --> 00:28:47.250 now written forbidden books he's a scholar who 00:28:47.250 --> 00:28:49.210 has spent years insulting all of his powerful 00:28:49.210 --> 00:28:53.049 colleagues and now he has no patron the political 00:28:53.049 --> 00:28:55.910 winds were also changing within the church. Things 00:28:55.910 --> 00:28:58.410 were getting more conservative. Yes. In 1277, 00:28:58.589 --> 00:29:00.769 the Bishop of Paris issued a famous condemnation 00:29:00.769 --> 00:29:04.390 of 219 philosophical and theological propositions. 00:29:04.750 --> 00:29:06.970 They were cracking down on certain interpretations 00:29:06.970 --> 00:29:09.849 of Aristotle, on deterministic astrology, on 00:29:09.849 --> 00:29:11.910 anything that smelled like it was limiting God's 00:29:11.910 --> 00:29:14.690 free will. And Bacon's work smelled a lot like 00:29:14.690 --> 00:29:17.130 all of those things. He was right in the crosshairs. 00:29:17.369 --> 00:29:19.849 And this leads to the next chapter of his life, 00:29:19.890 --> 00:29:22.670 or at least the legend of it, his imprisonment. 00:29:23.079 --> 00:29:25.200 The traditional narrative, the one you'll read 00:29:25.200 --> 00:29:28.559 in older books, is that in the late 1270s, the 00:29:28.559 --> 00:29:31.400 minister general of the Franciscans, a man named 00:29:31.400 --> 00:29:35.279 Jerome of Ascoli, threw Bacon in jail for suspected 00:29:35.279 --> 00:29:38.140 novelties. Suspected novelties. That sounds like 00:29:38.140 --> 00:29:40.420 a crime in a dystopian novel. You're accused 00:29:40.420 --> 00:29:43.319 of having new ideas. It does. And for a long 00:29:43.319 --> 00:29:45.759 time, historians believed he was thrown in a 00:29:45.759 --> 00:29:49.200 dungeon and spent over a decade there until Jerome 00:29:49.200 --> 00:29:51.599 of Ascoli, who later became Pope Nicholas IV, 00:29:51.799 --> 00:29:55.289 died. But modern scholarship has cast a lot of 00:29:55.289 --> 00:29:57.829 doubt on this story. Really? So he might not 00:29:57.829 --> 00:29:59.700 have been imprisoned at all. Well, the story 00:29:59.700 --> 00:30:01.839 might be an exaggeration. The first reference 00:30:01.839 --> 00:30:03.680 we have to this imprisonment doesn't appear in 00:30:03.680 --> 00:30:06.460 any document until 80 years after Bacon's death. 00:30:06.640 --> 00:30:09.400 That's a long time. Many modern scholars think 00:30:09.400 --> 00:30:11.140 the imprisonment might have been a less dramatic 00:30:11.140 --> 00:30:14.000 form of house arrest or perhaps just a continuation 00:30:14.000 --> 00:30:16.440 of the strict restrictions he was already under, 00:30:16.539 --> 00:30:19.059 a command for silence. If it wasn't for the science, 00:30:19.240 --> 00:30:21.640 why would they target him so severely? It might 00:30:21.640 --> 00:30:23.859 have been internal Franciscan politics. There 00:30:23.859 --> 00:30:26.339 was a huge, bitter split happening in the order 00:30:26.339 --> 00:30:29.380 at the time. One group, the spirituals, believed 00:30:29.380 --> 00:30:32.400 in absolute radical poverty, just like St. Francis. 00:30:32.740 --> 00:30:34.819 They thought the order was getting too rich and 00:30:34.819 --> 00:30:37.180 powerful. The other group, the conventuals, were 00:30:37.180 --> 00:30:39.319 more pragmatic and were okay with the order owning 00:30:39.319 --> 00:30:41.559 property and buildings. And let me guess where 00:30:41.559 --> 00:30:45.380 Bacon stood. Bacon was a radical. He sympathized 00:30:45.380 --> 00:30:48.079 strongly with the strict poverty group. It's 00:30:48.079 --> 00:30:49.880 very possible he was silenced not because of 00:30:49.880 --> 00:30:52.339 his science, but because he was a vocal and troublesome 00:30:52.339 --> 00:30:55.480 supporter of a radical faction in the internal 00:30:55.480 --> 00:30:58.119 politics of his own order. It was his personality 00:30:58.119 --> 00:31:00.420 and his politics, not just his ideas, that got 00:31:00.420 --> 00:31:02.339 him into trouble. So what happens in his final 00:31:02.339 --> 00:31:05.009 years is he just locked away in silence? The 00:31:05.009 --> 00:31:06.990 details are murky, but he seems to have been 00:31:06.990 --> 00:31:10.269 allowed to return to Oxford after 1278. He wrote 00:31:10.269 --> 00:31:13.089 one last work in 1292, the Compendium Studii 00:31:13.089 --> 00:31:16.390 Theologiae. And it's kind of a sad book, really. 00:31:16.470 --> 00:31:19.289 It doesn't add much that's new. It's mostly him 00:31:19.289 --> 00:31:21.309 complaining about the same old corruptions and 00:31:21.309 --> 00:31:23.130 errors that he'd been fighting against his whole 00:31:23.130 --> 00:31:26.529 life. He sounds tired. He sounds defeated. He 00:31:26.529 --> 00:31:29.309 died sometime around 1292 and was buried at the 00:31:29.309 --> 00:31:31.630 Franciscan church in Oxford. But death is really 00:31:31.630 --> 00:31:33.809 just the beginning of his second career. His 00:31:33.809 --> 00:31:36.150 career is a legend. Precisely. The historical 00:31:36.150 --> 00:31:40.210 man dies, but the wizard is born. Why did that 00:31:40.210 --> 00:31:42.569 happen? Why did he become a wizard in the public 00:31:42.569 --> 00:31:45.559 imagination instead of a failed reformer? Because 00:31:45.559 --> 00:31:47.819 the things he did looked like magic to ordinary 00:31:47.819 --> 00:31:50.559 people. He was a bit of a recluse. He lived in 00:31:50.559 --> 00:31:53.180 what legend called a study on a bridge. It looked 00:31:53.180 --> 00:31:55.440 like a tower. He worked with strange instruments, 00:31:55.759 --> 00:31:57.900 lenses and mirrors. He knew about explosives. 00:31:58.460 --> 00:32:01.380 To the uneducated peasant or even the uneducated 00:32:01.380 --> 00:32:03.940 noble of the time, that all looks exactly like 00:32:03.940 --> 00:32:06.220 magic. And so the brazen head story takes off. 00:32:06.380 --> 00:32:09.220 It becomes his defining myth. By the 16th century, 00:32:09.380 --> 00:32:11.279 the playwright Robert Greene writes a very famous 00:32:11.279 --> 00:32:13.900 play, The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and 00:32:13.900 --> 00:32:16.960 Friar Bungie. And in that play, Bacon is a full 00:32:16.960 --> 00:32:19.680 -on necromancer. He conjures devils. He has magic 00:32:19.680 --> 00:32:22.559 contests. He tries to build a brass wall around 00:32:22.559 --> 00:32:25.259 England to protect it from invaders. It's basically 00:32:25.259 --> 00:32:28.349 superhero fan fiction from the 1500s. It is. 00:32:28.450 --> 00:32:31.190 But it was incredibly popular and it defined 00:32:31.190 --> 00:32:34.750 his public image for centuries. Friar Bacon became 00:32:34.750 --> 00:32:37.609 a stock character, the brilliant but foolish 00:32:37.609 --> 00:32:40.470 magician who meddles with forces he can't control 00:32:40.470 --> 00:32:43.450 and is ultimately humbled. So when did that perception 00:32:43.450 --> 00:32:46.049 change? When did he get rehabilitated and become 00:32:46.049 --> 00:32:48.049 a scientist again? That really happened in the 00:32:48.049 --> 00:32:50.890 19th century during the Victorian era. Scholars 00:32:50.890 --> 00:32:53.130 at that time were looking for historical heroes. 00:32:53.430 --> 00:32:56.430 They were very invested in the idea that history 00:32:56.430 --> 00:32:58.880 was a long... battle between science and religion 00:32:58.880 --> 00:33:02.039 conflict thesis exactly and they looked back 00:33:02.039 --> 00:33:05.180 at roger bacon and saw a perfect martyr for their 00:33:05.180 --> 00:33:07.900 cause they said look he was a man of reason a 00:33:07.900 --> 00:33:10.559 true scientist trapped in the superstitious dark 00:33:10.559 --> 00:33:13.200 ages he was persecuted by the church for his 00:33:13.200 --> 00:33:16.599 genius he predicted the car he invented the scientific 00:33:16.599 --> 00:33:18.819 method they turned him into a modern man who 00:33:18.819 --> 00:33:20.680 was just wearing the wrong clothes a time traveler 00:33:20.680 --> 00:33:23.240 they projected their own values back onto him 00:33:23.240 --> 00:33:25.819 they tended to ignore the alchemy the astrology 00:33:25.819 --> 00:33:28.420 the deeply held theology, and they just cherry 00:33:28.420 --> 00:33:30.759 pick the science bits that look familiar to them. 00:33:30.880 --> 00:33:34.039 But the reality, as we've been discussing, is 00:33:34.039 --> 00:33:36.099 so much more complicated and interesting than 00:33:36.099 --> 00:33:38.859 that. The modern view, the 21st century view 00:33:38.859 --> 00:33:41.559 from historians like David Lindbergh, is that 00:33:41.559 --> 00:33:44.220 Bacon was thoroughly and completely a man of 00:33:44.220 --> 00:33:46.900 the Middle Ages. He wasn't a time traveler. He 00:33:46.900 --> 00:33:49.259 believed in the authority of the church. He believed 00:33:49.259 --> 00:33:52.319 the Bible was the ultimate source of truth. But 00:33:52.319 --> 00:33:54.200 he also believed that understanding the natural 00:33:54.200 --> 00:33:58.279 world. was a way to better serve God. Yes. And 00:33:58.279 --> 00:34:00.220 here's the part that really blows my mind, the 00:34:00.220 --> 00:34:02.779 part that ties it all together. Bacon wasn't 00:34:02.779 --> 00:34:05.119 developing gunpowder or predicting flying machines 00:34:05.119 --> 00:34:07.819 just to make life easier for people. He wasn't 00:34:07.819 --> 00:34:09.539 trying to invent a more convenient commute to 00:34:09.539 --> 00:34:12.480 work. No, not at all. He was preparing for war. 00:34:12.679 --> 00:34:15.239 He was preparing for the apocalypse. The apocalypse. 00:34:15.280 --> 00:34:17.739 He believed, like many in his time, that the 00:34:17.739 --> 00:34:20.599 Antichrist was coming and coming soon. He believed 00:34:20.599 --> 00:34:22.860 that the enemies of Christendom, the Mongols, 00:34:22.920 --> 00:34:25.940 the Saracens, the forces of the Antichrist, would 00:34:25.940 --> 00:34:28.260 use advanced knowledge, what he called magic 00:34:28.260 --> 00:34:30.980 or advanced mechanics, to try and defeat the 00:34:30.980 --> 00:34:34.099 Church. Bacon wanted the church to have those 00:34:34.099 --> 00:34:36.760 weapons first. So this is an arms race. It was 00:34:36.760 --> 00:34:40.199 a theological arms race. He wanted optics and 00:34:40.199 --> 00:34:42.780 astronomy and gunpowder to be used in defense 00:34:42.780 --> 00:34:45.260 of the faith. So the flying machines and the 00:34:45.260 --> 00:34:47.199 horseless carriages weren't for convenience. 00:34:47.539 --> 00:34:50.380 They were tanks and bombers for the armies of 00:34:50.380 --> 00:34:53.949 God in the final battle. In a way, yes. He writes 00:34:53.949 --> 00:34:56.750 explicitly about how arrays of mirrors could 00:34:56.750 --> 00:34:59.070 be used to burn enemy camps from a distance, 00:34:59.150 --> 00:35:02.010 like an ancient death ray. He writes about how 00:35:02.010 --> 00:35:04.230 explosives could be used to scatter armies and 00:35:04.230 --> 00:35:07.510 terrify them. His entire scientific program was, 00:35:07.690 --> 00:35:10.489 at its core, a project of Christian apologetics 00:35:10.489 --> 00:35:12.570 and defense. That puts a very, very different 00:35:12.570 --> 00:35:15.369 spin on the first scientist label. He wasn't 00:35:15.369 --> 00:35:17.349 trying to build our modern world. He was trying 00:35:17.349 --> 00:35:19.489 to save his medieval one from the end times. 00:35:19.670 --> 00:35:23.210 It is the supreme iron. of his life he advocated 00:35:23.210 --> 00:35:25.889 for the very tools empirical science technology 00:35:25.889 --> 00:35:28.889 a mechanical worldview that would eventually 00:35:28.889 --> 00:35:31.429 dismantle the medieval worldview he was so desperately 00:35:31.429 --> 00:35:33.769 trying to protect he pushed the snowball down 00:35:33.769 --> 00:35:35.909 the hill not knowing it would turn into an avalanche 00:35:35.909 --> 00:35:38.280 that would bury his own philosophy That is the 00:35:38.280 --> 00:35:41.199 beauty and the tragedy of Roger Bacon. He stands 00:35:41.199 --> 00:35:44.539 at a crossroads. He has one foot planted firmly 00:35:44.539 --> 00:35:46.880 in the world of saints and demons and divine 00:35:46.880 --> 00:35:49.539 revelation, and the other foot is stepping into 00:35:49.539 --> 00:35:51.920 the world of engines and telescopes and mathematical 00:35:51.920 --> 00:35:56.000 physics. So as we wrap up this deep dive, what 00:35:56.000 --> 00:35:58.860 is the key takeaway? Why should we still care? 00:35:59.440 --> 00:36:02.599 about a grumpy 13th century friar who failed 00:36:02.599 --> 00:36:04.739 to get his book published on time. I think we 00:36:04.739 --> 00:36:07.219 care because of his intellectual courage. He 00:36:07.219 --> 00:36:09.280 had the courage to say, I need to see it for 00:36:09.280 --> 00:36:11.780 myself. In an age of conformity and abuse to 00:36:11.780 --> 00:36:14.599 authority, he was a relentless critical thinker. 00:36:14.659 --> 00:36:16.960 He challenged the bad translations. He challenged 00:36:16.960 --> 00:36:19.340 the broken calendar. He even challenged the physics 00:36:19.340 --> 00:36:21.380 of Aristotle when his own experiments showed 00:36:21.380 --> 00:36:23.199 different results. And he paid the price for 00:36:23.199 --> 00:36:25.920 it. He died in obscurity without glory. He did, 00:36:26.119 --> 00:36:29.539 but he also left a profound legacy. He helped 00:36:29.539 --> 00:36:31.920 put optics on the map in Europe. He kept the 00:36:31.920 --> 00:36:34.139 flame of Greek and Arabic science alive in the 00:36:34.139 --> 00:36:36.519 West when many others were ignoring it. And he 00:36:36.519 --> 00:36:39.099 dreamt big. He dreamt of a world where humanity 00:36:39.099 --> 00:36:41.199 wasn't limited by its own muscles, but could 00:36:41.199 --> 00:36:43.820 fly and dive and travel at incredible speeds. 00:36:44.139 --> 00:36:46.619 He was a dreamer who did the math. That's a great 00:36:46.619 --> 00:36:48.559 way to put it. And here's a provocative thought 00:36:48.559 --> 00:36:51.699 to leave you with. Roger Bacon worked himself 00:36:51.699 --> 00:36:55.099 to the bone to create a scientific and technological 00:36:55.099 --> 00:36:58.500 defense for Christendom against what he believed 00:36:58.500 --> 00:37:01.599 was the coming Antichrist. He thought he was 00:37:01.599 --> 00:37:04.699 building spiritual armor. But the very things 00:37:04.699 --> 00:37:07.420 he championed, gunpowder, mechanics, empirical 00:37:07.420 --> 00:37:10.639 science, ended up building the modern, secular, 00:37:10.780 --> 00:37:13.659 industrial world that largely left his worldview 00:37:13.659 --> 00:37:16.860 behind. The law of unintended consequences on 00:37:16.860 --> 00:37:19.760 a civilizational scale. Exactly. So if we look 00:37:19.760 --> 00:37:22.960 back at our own scientific pioneers in 700 years, 00:37:23.199 --> 00:37:25.420 you know, the people building artificial intelligence 00:37:25.420 --> 00:37:28.219 right now or editing genes with CRISPR or trying 00:37:28.219 --> 00:37:30.960 to colonize Mars, will we misunderstand their 00:37:30.960 --> 00:37:33.280 motivations just as much as Bacon's were misunderstood? 00:37:33.760 --> 00:37:36.679 Will future generations turn our scientists into 00:37:36.679 --> 00:37:39.909 wizards and magicians with strange myths? Or 00:37:39.909 --> 00:37:42.150 will they see them as the high priests of a new 00:37:42.150 --> 00:37:44.429 religion we can't even recognize yet? Or will 00:37:44.429 --> 00:37:47.030 they realize they were just people like Bacon 00:37:47.030 --> 00:37:48.929 trying to save the world from their own version 00:37:48.929 --> 00:37:51.369 of the Antichrist and we just didn't understand 00:37:51.369 --> 00:37:53.389 the language they were speaking? It's a humbling 00:37:53.389 --> 00:37:55.989 thought, isn't it? We are all trapped in our 00:37:55.989 --> 00:37:57.929 own context, just like he was.