That seems irrelevant - I wasn't at all talking about which individuals were recognizably doing science, but where (the program of) modern science came from. Ba

That seems irrelevant - I wasn't at all talking about which individuals were recognizably doing science, but where (the program of) modern science came from. Bacon didn't do science, didn't 'employ the scientific method', just wrote about and promoted a huge program of scientific investigation, which is what we call 'modern science'. From The Oxford Francis Bacon: Before Bacon where else does one find a meticulously articulated view of [science] as an enterprise of instruments and experiment, an enterprise designed to restrain discursive reason and make good the defects of the senses? Where else in the literature before Bacon does one come across a stripped-down natural-historical programme of such enormous scope and scrupulous precision, and designed to serve as the basis for a complete reconstruction of human knowledge which would generate new, vastly productive sciences through a form of eliminative induction supported by various other procedures including deduction? Where else does one find a concept of scientific research which implies an institutional framework of such proportions that it required generations of permanent state funding to sustain it? And all this accompanied by a thorough, searching, and devastating attack on ancient and not-so-ancient philosophies, and by a provisional [science] anticipating the results of the new [science]? But thanks, I didn't know anything about Ibn al-Haytham, e.g. that his Book of Optics (written 1011-1021) "was read by and greatly influenced a number of scholars in Christian Europe including: Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Witelo, Giambattista della Porta, Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Christiaan Huygens, René Descartes, and Johannes Kepler"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham