ABSTRACT
Humans are creatures driven by intense curiosity. From ancient times this urge to discover focused not just on the myriad detail of our immediate environment but also on the much larger picture of human existence and its place within the vastness of the cosmos. Bacon, a lawyer, philosopher and Lord Chancellor of England, believed that there had been little real progress in the growth of scientific knowledge since the days of antiquity. He saw the status of science as "bogged down" in an obsessive preoccupation with final causes. The Italian Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, a contemporary of Descartes and a physiologist, mathematician, astronomer and politician, employed the Cartesian 'machine' view in order to explain many aspects of animal movement. In medieval cosmology, before Galileo in 1609 opened wide the 'window' of experimental astronomy, the scientific understanding of the world rested on two principal authorities, Aristotle and the Church.
