Around 1011, in Cairo, a scholar realised he had made a serious mistake with his career.
Ibn al-Haytham had proposed to the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim that the annual flooding of the Nile could be regulated by a dam near Aswan. He travelled south to survey the site, looked at the scale of what he had promised, and understood that with the engineering available to him it could not be done.
Al-Hakim was not a man to whom one delivered that news. He had a documented record of executing people for less.
So Ibn al-Haytham feigned madness, which in that court was one of the few reliable ways to become uninteresting, and was placed under house arrest.
He stayed there about ten years, until al-Hakim died in 1021.
During those ten years he wrote the Kitab al-Manazir, the Book of Optics.
Since Euclid and Ptolemy, optics had rested on the emission theory: the eye sees by sending out rays that strike objects. Ibn al-Haytham demolished it and replaced it with intromission, that vision happens when light reflected from an object enters the eye. This is correct, and it had been wrong for thirteen hundred years.
How he did it is the part that matters more than the conclusion.
He did not argue it philosophically. He tested it. He designed controlled experiments, isolated variables, recorded what happened, and drew conclusions from the results rather than from Aristotle.
And in setting out how he had proceeded, he described the procedure itself: form a hypothesis, devise an experiment capable of falsifying it, observe, conclude, and hold the conclusion only as firmly as the evidence permits.
That is the scientific method, written down, in Cairo, around 1015.
Francis Bacon, routinely named in English-language education as its father, was born in 1561. Five hundred and fifty years later.
He produced it because he had ten years.
Not ten years of funding, or ten years of tenure. Ten years in which nobody could ask him for anything. The most productive decade in the history of optics was bought by a man escaping a death sentence.
Set that beside the conditions this book ends by describing. Protect the thinkers. Free them from subsistence. Shield them from political interference and market pressure. Give them time, not weeks or months but years.
House arrest, for a scholar with a stipend and a library, accidentally satisfies every one of those.
Ask what the modern equivalent is. A three-year grant with deliverables at eighteen months. A publication count reviewed annually. A postdoc contract ending before the problem does.
Ibn al-Haytham had a decade of guaranteed non-interference and used it to work out how seeing works.
We would not fund that today, and we would have a reasonable-sounding process for explaining why not.