"According to Descartes, scientists should stay at home and deduce the laws of Nature by pure thought... scientists will need only the rules of logic and knowledge of the existence of God. For four hundred years since Bacon and Descartes... science has raced ahead by following both paths simultaneously. Neither Baconian empiricism nor Cartesian dogmatism has the power to elucidate Nature's secrets by itself, but both together have been amazingly successful. For four hundred years English scientists have tended to be Baconian and French scientists Cartesian. Faraday and Darwin and Rutherford were Baconians; Pascal and Laplace and Poincaré were Cartesians. Newton was at heart a Cartesian, using pure thought... to demolish the Cartesian dogma of vortices. Marie Curie was at heart a Baconian, boiling tons of crude uranium ore to demolish the dogma of the indestructibility of atoms."
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History of science
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