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The ideas of the scientific method are often traced back to Sir Francis Bacon’s 1620 book, Novum Organum, and to Galileo Galilei’s works in the 1630s. Broadly speaking, the main idea is that reductionism and inductive reasoning could be used to arrive at fundamental truths about the causes of natural events, which can then be compared with experience and experiment. This was quite a revolutionary idea because, at that time, your best bet of convincing anybody of your ideas would have been to argue that they matched Aristotle’s theories written 2,000 years earlier!

In the Baconian model, the scientist breaks natural phenomena down into component parts that are then compared to other components based on common themes. These reduced categories are then analyzed using principles of inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is a logical system of analysis where you start with specific true statements and work to create generalized laws that would apply to all situations by finding commonalities between the observed truths.