Descartes and Bacon

Descartes was a scientist, a philosopher, and a mathematician. He is famous for the argument "I think therefore I am."
He proposed that the human body obeys the laws of physics, just like everything else, which probably would have caused a little unease in the world, as humans like to think themselves special. However, in the same theory, the theory of dualism, he also said that the mind or the soul is completely independent of the laws of physics, and is unique to human beings based upon some biological assumptions he made.He extended this by saying that animals cannot feel pain, a view which would be extremely contested and highly controversial now, but in his time was probably slightly more welcomed, because it served as more proof that human beings are the most important. He also discovered the law of reflection, and an early version of the law of conservation of momentum, which shows that his scientific works were not all quite as influenced by philosophy and opinion as the first one mentioned.

Sir Francis Bacon's approach to science was far less affected by philosophy. His approach to gaining new knowledge was pretty much identical to the one still used today. According to Bacon, the best way to make scientific laws or facts os to infer something from an observation, make a hypothesis, and test it and analyze evidence to see whether it is true or not. This does not seem at all radical now, as it is how modern scientists go about with their work, though it may have been slightly more controversial. The idea of having to test a theory over and over may have been slightly unsatisfactory to other scientists of Bacon's time, as I am sure they preferred simply having their theories be true because as far as they had noticed, they were.