Not sure that I agree.
Certain that I don't. If you want to design buildings, you have to pass exams and qualifications as an architect. If you want to design structures, you have to pass exams and qualifications as an engineer. If you want to practice the law, you have to pass exams and qualifications as a lawyer. If you want to practice medicine, you have to pass exams and qualifications as a doctor. If you want to practice science, you experiment. Muthafukkas was all about experimentation going back to the Etruscans or before.
It's not really about the article, but a bit of a rant. I'm a bit surprised that it's a yet another article on the topic of "who and when we can call a scientist" that does not mention Sadi Carnot (the one of Carnot's Engine fame). His work in monograph Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (find me a title that sounds more badass! ;P) has been described[1] as one of the first that possessed all of the things that we now take as granted in a proper scientific publication: - Introduction to the problem and settling on certain 'stipulations' and setting a paradigm for further reasoning. - Mathematical model followed by using it along with real data. - Replicable description of the experiment that can be used to verify the hypothesis. - Conclusions and remarks on the implications of putting theory into practice (Carnot already was recognising that We should not expect to utilise in practice all the motive power of combustibles). - Bibliography and references. And all of that before the word scientist was even used for the first time, as francopoli pointed out in his post on this topic. [1]: In case you find yourself thinking 'citation needed', I'm near certain that it was from at least one of the following: - History of Physics by A.K. Wróblewski (here is his website for the course of the same name) - Physicists Look Back: Studies in the History of Physics - Editor's notes in second edition of (translated to English) Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire I'll update with any extra details when I'll find something more concrete.
The word did not exist until 1834. And yes, the author mentions that in his article, then dismisses it. Before then, these types of people were called Natural Philosophers. I'm assuming that most of the nerds here will know this, but Philosophy translates in Latin to "love of wisdome." The reason we don't use the word "scientist" to describe people before the 1600's is because Francis Bacon first described what we now call the Scientific Method in the 1620's. Were people doing experiments and making discoveries before then? of course they were. With the exception of a few extremely gifted persons, however, the pursuit of knowledge did not have an agreed upon framework. It was once there was a way to quantify knowledge, explore the natural world, create a way of talking about experiments that human information began to grow exponentially. All of this is common knowledge to people who study science, philosophy and engineering. I'm not sure what the point of the author is. The author wrote a nice article on Galileo
Why not just say that the nature of science has changed over the ages? It seems like an overreach to say that you can't call fucking Newton a scientist because his job description was different from what we would associate with the term today.
I really picture scientists as people spending inordinate amounts of time on a single subject, pouring through books and repeating tedious experiments, and then making conclusions based on the data. Brahe, Galelio et al. would seem to fit that. I agree that the job title of "scientist" wasn't defined back then and that science overlapped with what we would consider bunk today. However, the word 'scientist' provides a non-ambiguous way to communicate what they did. Calling Hooke a 'natural philosopher' doesn't really help inform people of what he did. Scientist, otoh, does. We could go around educating people on the various predecessors to modern scientist, but that would be an excercise in pedantry.