Daily History Challenge · No. 70 · Sunday 6 September 2026 · Gauntlet
Puzzle No. 70: Gauntlet
The Sunday Gauntlet: three before or after calls, four events to order and a final When? on Francis Bacon's Novum Organum and the scientific method.
Act 1: Chain, against Visigoths under Alaric sack Rome (410 CE)
After Visigoths under Alaric sack Rome
After Visigoths under Alaric sack Rome
After Visigoths under Alaric sack Rome
Act 2: Order, earliest first
Act 3: When?
In 1620 the English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon published Novum Organum (The New Organon), a programmatic call to reform the methods of natural knowledge. Its title deliberately set it against Aristotle's Organon: where Aristotelian logic reasoned deductively from universal premises through the syllogism, Bacon argued that genuine knowledge of nature must be built upward from careful, systematic observation and experiment toward general axioms by a disciplined process of induction. He warned against the 'Idols of the Mind', the habitual errors and biases that distort human reasoning, and urged that science be a collaborative, empirical and useful enterprise aimed at extending human power over nature. Although Bacon made few discoveries himself and his inductive scheme was never followed mechanically, his insistence on experiment, organised data-gathering and cooperative inquiry deeply shaped the ethos of the Scientific Revolution. His vision of institutionalised research directly inspired the founders of the Royal Society, and he is widely regarded as a principal architect of the modern experimental method.