What is "roger bacon"

Bacon \Bacon\, Roger Bacon \Roger Bacon\prop. n. Roger Bacon. A celebrated English philosopher of the thirteenth century. Born at or near Ilchester, Somersetshire, about 1214: died probably at Oxford in 1294. He is credited with a recognition of the importance of experiment in answering questions about the natural world, recognized the potential importance of gunpowder and explosives generally, and wrote comments about several of the physical sciences that anticipated facts proven by experiment only much later.

The Franciscan monk, Roger Bacon (c. 1214 - 1294) was an important transitional figure in chemistry as he was trained in the alchemical tradition, but introduced many of the modern concepts of experimental science. Bacon believed that experiment was necessary to support theory, but for him the theory as presented in the Bible was true and the experiment only underlined that truth. One of Bacon's lasting contributions was his references to gunpowder, bringing this discovery to the general attention of literate Europeans. Gunpowder had been known for centuries in China, being used for fireworks and incendiary grenades. Gunpowder is a simple mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate (known generally as saltpeter). Saltpeter is a major component of guano (bird droppings) and may be recovered from privies where it will crystallize. By 1324, Europeans had discovered the art of using gunpowder to fire a projectile, marking the end of the period of castles and knights in armor.
--Prof. Tom Bitterwolf, Univ. of Idaho (Post-class notes, 1999).

Roger Bacon was Born at or near Ilchester, Somersetshire, about 1214: died probably at Oxford in 1294. He was educated at Oxford and Paris (whence he appears to have returned to England about 1250), and joined the Franciscan order. In 1257 he was sent by his superiors to Paris where he was kept in close confinement for several years. About 1265 he was invited by Pope Clement IV. to write a general treatise on the sciences, in answer to which he composed his chief work, the "Opus Majus." He was in England in 1268. In 1278 his writings were condemned as heretical by a council of his order, in consequence of which he was again placed in confinement. He was at liberty in 1292. Besides the "Opus Majus," his most notable works are "Opus Minus," "Opus Tertium," and "Compendium Philosophiae." See Siebert, "Roger Bacon," 1861; Held, "Roger Bacon's Praktische Philosophie," 1881; and L. Schneider, "Roger Bacon," 1873.
--Century Dict. 1906.

Dr. Whewell says that Roger Bacon's Opus Majus is "the encyclopedia and Novam Organon of the Thirteenth Century, a work equally wonderful with regard to its general scheme and to the special treatises with which the outlines of the plans are filled up.[sb] The professed object of the work is to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not made a greater progress, to draw back attention to the sources of knowledge which had been unwisely neglected, to discover other sources which were yet almost untouched, and to animate men in the undertaking by a prospect of the vast advantages which it offered.[sb] In the development of this plan all the leading portions of science are expanded in the most complete shape which they had at that time assumed; and improvements of a very wide and striking kind are proposed in some of the principal branches of study.[sb] Even if the work had no leading purposes it would have been highly valuable as a treasure of the most solid knowledge and soundest speculations of the time; even if it bad contained no such details it would have been a work most remarkable for its general views and scope."
--James J. Walsh (Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries, 1913.

Roger Bacon was a philosopher and friar.

Roger Bacon may also refer to:

• Roger Stuart Bacon, Nova Scotian premier
• Roger Bacon (physicist), American physicist

Roger Bacon, OFM ( or , also , "Brother Roger"; ), also known by the scholastic accolade ( Latin for "wondrous 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 . 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 (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/mm (19,600 MPa), 7×10 dyne/cm (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.

Invention of the carbon nanotube is credited to Sumio Iijima in 1991, but Figure 8 in Bacon’s paper shows a carbon nanotube derived from a whisker subjected to heavy current that caused the outer layers to explode. Iijima's invention is a seamless tube of diameter <30 nm, as opposed to Bacon's scrolled sheet.

Bacon won several awards for his invention, including honors from the Franklin Institute in 2004 and the University of Delaware. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016. In 2003, the American Chemical Society recognized the development of carbon fibers as a National Historic Chemical Landmark.

Bacon was born in Cleveland on April 16, 1926. He earned a bachelor's degree at Haverford College in 1951 and a Ph.D. in solid-state physics at Case Institute of Technology in 1955. Bacon worked for National Carbon, a subsidiary of Union Carbide Corp., from 1956 to 1986, and Amoco Polymers Group from 1986 until his retirement in 1998. He also taught physics at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, from 1959 to 1971. He died of leukemia at his home in Oberlin, Ohio, on 26 January 2007, and was survived by his wife Agnes, two children and five grandchildren.