Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold Read Online Free Page B

for income, he started a brewery and alehouse near London Bridge, attracting attention with an underwater contraption that appeared to be a monster. Drebbel died in 1633, and the secrets of his marvelous devices perished with him.
    For Francis Bacon, the glory of arriving at probability became the touchstone of his later life. Shorn of his political responsibilities, he turned his mind again toward natural science, writing several seminal works during his last five years of life, from 1621 to 1626. It was in these natural science books, perhaps more than in his earlier political tracts, that Bacon did what Robert Hooke later admired: he countered "the receiv'd philosophy" and in so doing made possible many subsequent steps in science, in particular those leading to the greater understanding of the cold that this book chronicles.
    The most formidable barrier to comprehending cold was established belief, and Bacon's intellectual leadership was crucial to piercing this barrier. His lifelong aim was to be "like a bell-ringer, which is first up to call others to church." Whether exampled by the parish of law or the parish of natural philosophy, for Bacon the goal was "the study of Truth," pursued through the "desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order." He applied these virtues in the service of the inductive method, the making of proper observations and experiments as a basis for drawing conclusions about the workings of the natural world. His
Instauratio Magna
announced a "trial" of the "commerce" or correspondence between what humankind believed it knew about the natural world and the true "nature of things," because the goal of bringing the two into congruence was "more precious than anything on earth." To properly contemplate the natural world, he contended, required the rejection of error-riddled previous natural philosophies, particularly that of Aristotle, whose natural philosophy Bacon thought overly based on deductive logic. "I seem to have my conversation among the ancients more than among those with whom I live," Bacon explained in a letter to a friend in Paris, the chemist Isaac Casaubon.
    In Aristotle's view, if one knew the significant "facts" about nature—such as that all things were combinations of the four elements, air, fire, earth, and water—one could deduce whatever humanity needed to know about the world. Aristotle's seventeenth-century followers refused to consider as valid the contemporary experiments investigating or manipulating nature to determine previously hidden properties and causes. Bacon supported such experiments, arguing that "nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art [forced experimentation] than when left to herself," since nature was like Proteus, the mythical creature who could conceal his identity in myriad shapes until bound in chains, whereupon his true identity was revealed. While Bacon's main target was Aristotle, he also sought to refute artificers such as Drebbel, whose dabblings were based on inconsistent observations and on an absence of rigorous, documented experimentation. "My great desire is to draw the sciences out of their hiding-places into the light," Bacon also told Casaubon. The public considered things to be "marvelous" only so long as their causes remained unknown, he wrote, but "an explanation of the causes removes the marvel," and the business of science must be to identify and explain those causes.
    For the mind to pursue a better understanding of nature, Bacon believed that it must first be purged of preconceptions. Identifying four "idols" of preconception, he railed against them as though he were Jehovah warning his chosen people against the worship of false gods. These were the Idols of the Theatre, a reliance on received philosophical systems, which had perverted the rule of demonstration—that was Aristotle's failing; the