New Atlantis

When European explorers wash ashore on the mysterious island of Bensalem, they discover a utopia that operates on principles their world has never imagined. The people of this hidden nation have organized their entire society around the systematic study of nature: Salomon's House, their great college, conducts experiments, accumulates knowledge, and develops technologies that seem like magic to outsiders devices for controlling the weather, cures for ancient diseases, instruments to speak across oceans. Yet this is no godless technocracy. The Bensalemites are deeply devout, their scientific pursuits woven through with religious devotion, their ultimate aim the glory of God and the relief of man's estate. Written in 1623 and published posthumously in 1627, Francis Bacon's fragment imagines the research university centuries before it existed. He never completed it; the second half describing Bensalem's laws and government was lost to history. But what remains is a founding document of scientific imagination, a vision of organized knowledge that would reshape the world.