FRANCIS BACON, FROZEN CHICKEN AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
They say Pond Square, in London’s Highgate, is haunted by the ghost of a half-plucked chicken. Reported sightings are few and far between now but there were documented encounters during the Second World War and in the 1960s. As recently as the 1970s a courting couple claimed their passionate embrace among the stately London plane trees of the square was interrupted when the avian apparition dropped from the sky and landed beside them. After running in circles for a few moments, squawking all the while, it apparently vanished into the thin air from which it had come.
The legend of the spirit chicken is a footnote to a story, a moment, almost as strange, involving Sir Francis Bacon, sometime Lord Chancellor of England and eulogized by some as a father, if not the father, of the scientific method.
Born in 1561, in London, he was a man with an eye on a future made better for humankind by the philosophy of science. Central to his thinking was that it was not enough merely to think one’s way to explanations for the workings of the world, as the Greek philosophers had done. He wrote of those ancients that they ‘assuredly have that which is characteristic of boys; they are prompt to prattle but cannot generate; for their wisdom abounds in words but is barren of works..’ Rather, he said, it was necessary – vital – to devise and perform experiments to test ideas, and then to analyse any results. This was the scientific method, in essence the same that underpins scientific investigation to this day.
Bacon was a man of many parts, imagined by some as the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. In his time he was also a jurist, statesman and author, a favourite of Elizabeth I and also close to her successor James VI and I.
Appointed Lord Chancellor in 1618 he fell into debt – and from grace. Leaving behind the world of politics then, he focused on science. And so it was that in the spring of 1626 the moment came that fixed him for ever in the firmament of scientific stars …
On a fearful, cold April day he was travelling in a carriage with a Dr Winterbourne. By way of conversation, Bacon suggested it ought to be possible to preserve meat by freezing it, but his companion was unconvinced. They were passing through the village of Highgate at the time and, determined to prove his theory, Bacon had the carriage driver pull to a halt outside a house. He climbed out and knocked on the door. A woman answered, and after a few minutes Bacon had purchased a chicken from her. He had her partially pluck and gut the carcass before taking it to snow-covered ground nearby, in what is now Pond Square. There he packed the bird’s cavity with snow and then, having placed it inside a bag, he packed more snow around it, dug a hole and buried the bundle. Back in the carriage, Bacon was severely chilled – to such an extent that Dr Winterbourne had the carriage divert to the nearby home of the Earl of Arundel, where Bacon was put to bed. The cot had been heated with a hot pan but no one had slept in it for a year or more and the sheets were damp. His condition worsened rapidly, and within a few days he was dead – although not before finding the strength to write a note for his absentee host, Arundel: I was … desirous to try an experiment or two touching the conservation and induration of bodies … it succeeded excellently well…
What more can a man do to demonstrate the value of experiment than to make himself a martyr to the process? In an unfinished novel called New Atlantis – published in 1627, the year after his death – Bacon had imagined a utopian island where the search to expand human knowledge was paramount. The very heart of the place was a college dedicated to the works and creatures of God… The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes; and the secret motion of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
Bacon has been made a milestone, or a touchstone – an icon of sorts – but he was not alone in coming to the conclusion that observation and experiment were keys to understanding the natural world and the wider cosmos. Kepler was there at the beginning too, and Brahe and Galileo.
English physician William Harvey observed and described the circulation of blood from the heart to the brain and the rest of the body. They were few, but they were on the right path. With the advent of the seventeenth century, and the coming of tools like the telescope and the microscope, humankind was taking its first steps towards the modern world.
Source ~ “The Story of The World in 100 Moments” by Neil Oliver