Certain observations about scientists’ collective behavior long mystified me. Given an established theory that explains old evidence and but not new evidence, and a new hypothesis that also accounts for some new phenomena, scientists routinely demand (and defend demanding!) much more rigorous testing of the new hypothesis than the old theory ever withstood, before they will even accord it parity with the old. Also, when new data actually falsify an old theory, they will go to great lengths to try to rescue it, inventing no end of ad-hoc epicycles. Data that contradicts all known theories is carefully ignored.
My just-so story is that scientists are self-selected as people who Need to Know. To go from one established theory to two alternatives would be to step from knowing to uncertainty. To abandon a falsified theory would be to step from knowing to not knowing. Either of these is intolerable to one who Needs to Know. As a consequence, science is riddled with established, falsified old theories, and routinely ignores both viable new hypotheses and new data that doesn’t fit any hypothesis.
If you need concrete examples, consider the quasar (a high-redshift light source) discovered in NGC7319 (an opaque low-redshift galaxy, one of Stephen’s Quintet, in Pegasus) a few years back, and since very studiously ignored. Or, consider the standard theory of comet formation, flatly contradicted by every observation, but still trotted out in textbooks and NASA press releases. Each new press release expresses hope that its observations may someday help illuminate dark matter and dark energy, which thus far exist solely to rescue otherwise falsified models of galactic and supergalactic dynamics and cosmology.
I’m afraid Francis Bacon cribbed essentially all of his scientific method from an Iraqi usually called “Ibn al Haytham” (or “Alhacen”, or “Alhazen”, in different contexts).
Al Haytham invented modern science as an adjunct to studying (i.e., creating the field of) optics, about a thousand years ago. Appealingly, instead of simply advocating the method, he demonstrated using it to investigate natural phenomena, and explained, alongside his results, how the method offered the reader both confidence in his results and a means to correct his errors.
Bacon deserves some credit for bringing al Haytham’s insights to the English-speaking public, centuries later. He didn’t pretend to originality, but the English at the time weren’t very interested in what an Iraqi had done 500 years earlier.