In the spring of 1626, an elderly statesman leapt from his carriage in a snowstorm, bought a dead chicken, and stuffed it with snow to test whether cold preserves meat. The experiment gave Francis Bacon fatal pneumonia. This episode traces how a man born into Tudor political royalty in 1561, sent to Cambridge at 12, and left in debt by his father's sudden death spent decades chasing office through the treacherous courts of Elizabeth I and James I.

We follow his bond with the Earl of Essex and his role prosecuting his former patron for treason, his rise to Lord Chancellor in 1618, and his 1621 fall on 23 counts of corruption orchestrated by his lifelong rival Edward Coke. Then we turn to the Novum Organum, inductive reasoning, and the four idols of the mind that mapped human cognitive bias centuries before modern psychology, along with his i ...