Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon, OFM (Latin: Rogerus or Rogerius Bacon, also Frater Rogerus, "Brother Roger"; c. 1219/20 – c. 1292), also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis (Latin for "astonishing doctor"), was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited (mainly since the 19th century) as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method inspired by Aristotle and by later scholars such as the Arab scientist Alhazen. His linguistic work has been heralded for its early exposition of a universal grammar. However, more recent re-evaluations emphasise that Roger Bacon was essentially a medieval thinker, with much of his "experimental" knowledge obtained from books in the scholastic tradition. He was, however, partially responsible for a revision of the medieval university curriculum, which saw the addition of optics to the traditional quadrivium. A survey of how Bacon's work was received over the centuries found that it often reflected the concerns and controversies that were central to his readers.

Roger Bacon (disambiguation)

Roger Bacon was a philosopher and friar.

Roger Bacon may also refer to:

Roger Stuart Bacon

Roger Stuart Bacon (born June 29, 1926) is a retired Nova Scotia politician who was the 21st Premier of Nova Scotia from 1990 to 1991.

Born in Upper Nappan, Nova Scotia, Bacon was a farmer when he was first elected to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly in 1970 as a Progressive Conservative. When the Tories won election in 1978, Bacon was Minister of Tourism before becoming Minister of Agriculture in the cabinet of Premier John Buchanan from 1979 to 1988. Bacon then became Deputy Premier and Minister of Housing until 1990, when he succeeded Buchanan to become interim leader of the party and caretaker premier of the province for six months until the party chose Donald W. Cameron as its new leader.

Portrait

In 2006, Bacon's portrait was created by Canadian artist Christian Cardell Corbet.

References

Roger Bacon (physicist)

Roger Bacon (1926–2007) was a physicist at the Parma Technical Center of National Carbon Company in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, where he invented graphite fibers in 1958.

Bacon was trying to measure the triple point of carbon--the temperature and pressure where solid, liquid and gas are in thermodynamic equilibrium--in a direct-current carbon arc furnace when he noticed stalagmite-like filaments growing from the vapor phase at lower pressures on the negative electrode. The condensate was embedded with flexible graphite whiskers as much as 5 µm in diameter and 3 cm long. Bacon estimated the production cost of the whiskers at the time as $10 million per pound.

After more than a year of research on the fibers, Bacon published his results. The fibers were characterized as scrolled sheets of graphite where the crystallographic c-axis was exactly perpendicular to the cylindrical axis. The fiber cylinders had either a circular or elliptical cross-section. The fibers were not actually single crystals, but behaved as single crystals along the filament axis. The fibers were grown in an atmosphere of argon, pressure = 92 atm and temperature = 3900K. The tensile strength, elastic modulus and room-temperature resistivity were as much as 2000 kg/mm² (19,600 MPa), 7×10¹² dyne/cm² (700 GPa) and 65 μΩ·cm, all comparable to the single-crystal values. The triple-point of carbon was confirmed as approximately 100 atm and 3900 K. The strength and modulus for the best steels are typically 2000 MPa and 200 GPa, resp.