The Long Way Back to Ourselves

6.4

The Scientific Revolution: The Admission of Ignorance

This episode is about the moment it became acceptable to say publicly that an answer was not written in any existing book, traced through Francis Bacon's 1620 warning against the idols of the mind. You follow Galileo's 1610 telescope observations of Jupiter's moons and Venus's phases, set against contemporaries such as Cesare Cremonini, who refused to look through the instrument at all. A central case is the ship's surgeon James Lind, who ran a controlled trial on scurvy in 1747 using citrus fruit, yet failed to recognize his own finding and delayed its adoption by decades. The episode leaves you with a more complicated picture of how self-correction actually works.