Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England, a corrupt courtier (he was eventually impeached), and the prophet of modern science. He argued that Aristotelian logic — pure deduction from authoritative premises — had produced two thousand years of brilliant but empty disputation. To actually understand nature, you must interrogate it: gather observations, run experiments, build up from particulars to general laws.

His Novum Organum ("the new instrument") sets out this inductive method as a replacement for Aristotle's Organon. His idols — of the Tribe, the Cave, the Marketplace, the Theater — are a still-useful catalogue of the biases that distort human thought. His unfinished utopia, The New Atlantis, imagines a society organized around a state-funded research institute; the Royal Society, founded forty years later, took it as a blueprint.

Bacon did not himself do much science. But he gave science its self-understanding.