You suddenly realize this is no contemporary man at all and his conception of how the world works is completely alien.

From Links & What I've Been Reading Q3 2020 by Alvaro de Menard.  His review of Novum Organum by Francis Bacon, a book marking a key part of the transition from the ancient to the modern, documenting new thinking about the world while all the old received wisdom was still prevalent.

Novum Organum by Francis Bacon. While he did not actually invent the scientific method, his discussion of empiricism, experiments, and induction was clearly a step in that direction. The first part deals with science and empiricism and induction from an abstract perspective and it feels almost contemporary, like it was written by a time traveling 19th century scientist or something like that. The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns is already in full swing here, Bacon dunks on the Greeks constantly and upbraids people for blindly listening to Aristotle. Question received dogma and popular opinions, he says. He points to inventions like gunpowder and the compass and printing and paper and says that surely these indicate that there's a ton of undiscovered ideas out there, we should go looking for them. He talks about cognitive biases and scientific progress:

we are laying the foundations not of a sect or of a dogma, but of human progress and empowerment.

Then you get to the second part and the middle ages hit you like a freight train, you suddenly realize this is no contemporary man at all and his conception of how the world works is completely alien. Ideas that to us seem bizarre and just intuitively nonsensical (about gravity, heat, light, biology, etc.) are only common sense to him. He repeats absurdities about worms and flies arising spontaneously out of putrefaction, that light objects are pulled to the heavens while heavy objects are pulled to the earth, and so on. Not just surface-level opinions, but fundamental things that you wouldn't even think someone else could possibly perceive differently. 
 
You won't learn anything new from Bacon, but it's a fascinating historical document.