An imagined gathering
1620 · London, England
Bacon gathers Galileo and Kepler to test his argument that knowledge must be built from experiment rather than ancient authority.
Bacon's London lodgings are crowded with instruments, specimens, and unfinished manuscripts, and he has invited two men whose work he reads with more attention than he admits. Galileo has come north with a small telescope and news of the moons of Jupiter; Kepler has brought tables of planetary positions and a temperament as mystical as Bacon's is practical.
The evening turns on a single question: how should a natural philosopher proceed? Bacon wants a patient induction from particulars, and he distrusts Kepler's search for harmonies and Galileo's preference for mathematical demonstration. The two guests defend their methods with examples, and Bacon, who enjoys an argument more than an agreement, is well satisfied. The dishes are plain English: a goose, a pottage, and bread, with spiced wine to close.
Host: Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei — Astronomer and mathematician, lately the most talked-about man in Italy.
Johannes Kepler — Imperial mathematician at Linz and a tireless correspondent.
a period dish
First course
a period dish
First course
a period dish
Drink
a period dish
Francis Bacon
Bacon's insistence that knowledge be gathered from experiment and observation, not deduced from ancient authority.
Galileo Galilei
What Galileo saw through his improved spyglass — lunar mountains, Jupiter's moons, the phases of Venus — and why it unsettled the received cosmos.
Johannes Kepler
Kepler's three rules: elliptical orbits, equal areas swept in equal times, and the harmony between a planet's period and its distance.
This gathering is an editorial recreation grounded in the biographies of those present; it did not necessarily take place as described.