The Importance of Scientific Experiments
The upspring of modern science probably can be traced back to the era of Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon is a great monk and philosopher from Oxford, who was born in 1214, and died in 1292. He might be the first person who brought up the idea that we had to study science by observing and experimenting the objects around us. While he himself had many significant discoveries, Galileo, who lived 300 years later, was the greatest among several other great men. They, came from several different countries, such as Italy, French, Germany and England, made people realize gradually that many important truth could be discovered through well-controlled observations. Before Galileo, scholars believed that the small objects would fall faster than the larger ones, because Aristotle said so. But Galileo climbed up the Leaning Tower of Pisa and proved to his friends, whom he brought to observe the experiment, that Aristotle was wrong by demonstrating that two stones with different volumes touched the ground at exactly the same time. This very spirit of Galileo, i.e. proving our judgements and theories by direct experiments in nature, introduced all the great discoveries of modern science.