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During his lifetime, Bacon bore witness to many of the great discoveries that defined the science of his era and that would later shape the nature of scientific thought. In particular, he was alive when Kepler published his first two laws of planetary motion, and also when Galileo published the first telescopic observations. Such events were of great importance to the academic community of the time and as such, would have had a great impact on Bacon and how he perceived the state of science in his time. In fact, the acceptance of Kepler’s laws, and of Galileo’s observations directly contradicted the foundations of Aristotelian geocentric cosmology and therefore, with these new ideas being proliferated, there was a general stance that perhaps science would need to be reformulated. It was this reformulation that Bacon sought to carry out from early in his studies, although he did not publish any material on the subject until much later in his life.

No longer able to pursue a state position, Bacon resigned himself to intellectual endeavours for the remaining years of his life and it is during this period that he made his significant contributions to natural philosophy, having already spent decades refining his intellect and critical thinking in the courts and in politics.[[CiteRef::Lovejoy (1888)]] In 1620, shortly before his political downfall, Bacon published his Novum Organum, where he sought to supply “true directions concerning the interpretation of nature”.[[CiteRef::Bacon (1878)]] In this text, Bacon makes a normative suggestion as to how the methodology should be revised from the Aristotelian methodology to the first empirical methodology. A variation of the inductive, empirical methodology that he introduced was eventually adopted by all natural philosophers that immediately succeeded him, such as Descartes and Newton.