subject: Who Was Roger Bacon [print this page] Roger Bacon was a great scientist who lived in England about 650 years ago. He was born in the year 1214 and became a monk of the order of St. Francis, a society of men in the Roman Catholic Church who swear to be forever poor, to obey the head of the society, never to marry, and never to own anything. A member of this society is called friar, which means "brother." Bacon became a teacher at Oxford University. At that time men learned about science by reading books written by Aristotle and other great writers who had lived 1,500 years earlier in Greece.
Nobody thought for a moment that Aristotle might have been mistaken about some of his ideas. Bacon said this method of learning science was all wrong. Like modern scientists, he believed that experiments should be performed to discover the truth. He also believed that science students should study mathematics so that they could understand science better. Today, all students of science must learn mathematics. Bacon's ideas, which seem wise and right today, were considered crazy and dangerous in his own time, and he was put in prison. He spent almost 14 years in prison but probably was released before he died in 1294.Roger Bacon, also known as Doctor Mirabilis .The only source for his date of birth is his statement in the Opus Tertium, written in 1267, that "forty years have passed since I first learned the alphabet". The 1214 birth date assumes he was not being literal, and may have meant 40 years had passed since he matriculated at Oxford at the age of 13.
