Bacon: New Atlantis

Imagine you are a sailor, lost at sea for months, food running out. Suddenly you see an island no map has ever shown. The people there are kind. They take care of you. And they have a secret: a great house full of scientists, finding out everything about nature, and using it to help everyone.

That is the story Francis Bacon told in New Atlantis, about 400 years ago. The island is called Bensalem. Its house of learning is called Salomon's House. Bacon described its deep caves and tall towers for studying weather, its gardens and zoos for studying plants and animals, its rooms for light and sound, and even machines for flying and for going under water. In his day, none of these existed.

Who, when and why

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), lawyer, statesman and philosopher of science (see the rung on his Novum Organum), left this short story unfinished. His chaplain William Rawley published it in 1627, the year after Bacon died, at the end of Bacon's book of natural history, Sylva Sylvarum. It was written in English, so we can read it in Bacon's own words.

It belongs to a family of books about imagined ideal places, after Thomas More's Utopia (1516). But where More was mostly interested in laws and property, Bacon's island is organized around research.

The problem Bacon faced

Bacon believed that knowledge of nature could relieve hunger, disease and toil, but that no one person could do the work: it needed many hands, organized, paid and lasting for generations. Universities taught old books; craftsmen kept their skills secret. He could argue for a new kind of institution, but a story let readers see one working.

The story

A ship sailing from Peru toward China and Japan is blown off course and finds Bensalem. The islanders give the crew a hospital and food and refuse any payment. The visitors learn the island's history: an old king named Solamona founded a great college, and the island keeps itself hidden from the world while sending out secret travelers to learn from it. The islanders are Christians, by an event the story tells as a miracle; Bacon presents their faith and their science as living side by side. Near the end, one of the Fathers of Salomon's House receives the narrator and describes the house. The book stops in the middle of his speech, with the note "The rest was not perfected."

Idea 1: a house of research

The Father lists the house's "preparations and instruments": caves as deep as six hundred fathoms for studying cold and minerals, towers half a mile high for weather, lakes of salt and fresh water, orchards and gardens for breeding new plants, parks of animals, kitchens and furnaces, and houses for light, sound, smells, engines and mathematics.

Bacon wrote this in the 1620s, when the telescope and the microscope were brand new. He also imagines "some degrees of flying in the air", boats that go under water, and ways to send sounds through pipes over long distances.

Idea 2: a division of labor

The research is split among teams. Twelve Merchants of Light travel abroad in secret to bring back books and experiments. Others collect experiments from books, from the crafts, and by trying new ones. Compilers arrange the results in tables. Benefactors look for practical uses. After meetings of the whole body, Lamps plan new, deeper experiments, Inoculators carry them out, and Interpreters of Nature raise the results into general laws.

Idea 3: honesty in science

Getting the history right

• It inspired a real society. The founders of the Royal Society of London (1660) saw themselves as building something like Salomon's House. Its early historian, Thomas Sprat, and the poet Abraham Cowley both praised Bacon as their guide.
• It is not a prophecy. Some of Bacon's "inventions" sound modern, but he was listing hopes, often vague ones. The value of the book is its picture of organized, funded, cooperative research, not its predictions.
• Secrecy. Bacon's scientists decide which discoveries to publish and which to keep secret, even from the state. Real science, from the Royal Society's journal (1665) on, went the other way, toward open publication, though debates about secret research continue.

What later science kept, and what it changed

Kept: research as a team effort, supported by the public or by patrons over many years; labs, observatories, botanical gardens and museums; the link between science and practical benefit. National academies, research universities and government labs all follow, in their own ways, the pattern Bacon sketched. Changed: open publication and peer review replaced secrecy, and scientists now argue about results in public journals instead of in a closed house.

"All things possible." The house aims at "the effecting of all things possible." Is that a noble goal or a dangerous one? Bacon's islanders keep some discoveries secret because they judge them too dangerous. Who should decide what science does and what it shares? These questions are still debated, and thoughtful people answer them differently.

Faith and science together. Bensalem's people pray before and after their work and give thanks for discoveries. Bacon presents science and Christian faith as allies. Compare Galileo's trouble with church authorities, and Kepler's prayer at the end of the Harmonies. Thinkers of that century held many different views on how the two relate.

Utopia and its cousins. Later stories imagined research societies too, some hopeful, some warning: Jonathan Swift mocked a foolish academy of projectors in Gulliver's Travels (1726), on this ladder.

Big questions. Why did Bacon tell this as a story instead of an argument? What makes an ideal society? Should a society be organized around learning?