Francis Bacon
Knowledge is power: observe and experiment.
Misconceptions
"Knowledge is power" is Bacon's phrase.
The words "ipsa scientia potestas est" ("knowledge itself is a power") are indeed his (Sacred Meditations, 1597), but in a parenthesis about God's knowledge, which is part of God's power: nothing about human power. The modern idea comes from the Novum Organum (1620): "human knowledge and human power meet in one", because we produce an effect only by knowing its cause. The exact phrase "scientia potentia est" is found in Hobbes, in the Latin version of Leviathan (1668), who immediately adds: "but small".
For Bacon, science consists in piling up facts.
He mocks pure empiricists, like the ant that gathers without transforming, as much as pure reasoners, like the spider spinning its web out of itself. The true scientist is the bee: it gathers, then transforms by a power of its own.
For Bacon, science leads away from God.
He writes the opposite: a little philosophy inclines to atheism, depth in philosophy brings men back to religion. But he wants the domains kept apart: looking for physics in Genesis or the book of Job produces, he says, a fanciful philosophy and a heretical religion.
Bacon is the real author of Shakespeare's plays.
No document of the period supports it. The idea arose in the 19th century, popularised by the American Delia Bacon (1857, no relation), and historians reject it.