False Idols, Bacon, and Physics

For years I've been struggling with expressing why learning physics is hard (e.g. lying, words being imprecise, belief, our shallowness, objective vs subjective, bad intuition).

For months I've been picking my way through an impulse buy, one philosophy idea at a time:


Today I read the passage for 1626:

Francis Bacon and his four false idols that prevent us from seeing things clearly.  Aha - here it all is, already nicely packaged:

scanned from the book above

Here I was all embarrassed by my impulse buy being somehow low brow, but - you know what - turns out I should have studied more philosophy in school!