At the beginning of the 17th century, the contemporary wisdom was that it was sufficient for any good philosopher to know the writings of the masters off by heart. To understand them was of secondary importance, and to contradict them was tantamount to blasphemy.
Among the first to claim that this Aristotelian approach was wrong was Francis Bacon. Science, he maintained, could be advanced only by studying Nature, and then by making sense of what one found; as he put it himself: "If a man begin with certainties he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."
Bacon was just three years older than William Shakespeare. Although a lawyer by profession and one who, after many ups and downs, became Lord Chancellor of England, it is for the clarity of his writing, and as a pioneer of scientific thought, that Bacon is remembered. But despite his dedication to logical precision, Bacon's main contribution to the science of meteorology was a red herring known as "Bacon's Prime".
It was described in his 1620 essay, "On the Vicissitudes of Things": "They say it is observed in the Low Countries that every five and thirty years the same kind and sort of weather comes about again; as great frosts, great wet, great droughts, warm winters, summers with little heat and the like; and they call it the `prime'; it is a thing I do rather mention because computing backwards I have found some concurrence."
This concurrence was avidly pursued. Meteorologists in succeeding centuries spent many happy hours looking for Francis Bacon's 35-year cycle. Now and then one would claim that he had found it in a set of records; then another would spend years disproving this assertion.
Bacon's Prime became a kind of elixir, widely believed in, never found, but ever sought. Perhaps, as Bacon himself once said, "Quod enim mavult homo verum esse, id potius credit", "For what a man would like to be the truth, that doth he more readily believe."
A year later, in 1621, charges of corruption and bribery were preferred against Francis Bacon, and after some time as a prisoner in the Tower of London he spent the remainder of his life in quiet and scholarly retirement.
In the end he became a victim of his dedication to experiment. Stuffing a freshly-killed chicken with snow to see if the flesh could be preserved by freezing, Bacon caught a chill; the chill developed into pneumonia from which he died, 373 years ago today, on April 10th, 1626.