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Scientist

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This article is about the profession. For other uses, see Scientist (disambiguation).

Albert Einstein is arguably the most widely recognized scientist among the general public.

A scientist is an expert in at least one area of science who uses the scientific method to do research. William Whewell coined the word in 1833 at the request of the poet Coleridge. Before that, it had been "natural philosopher" or "man of science". Scientists have an innate desire to understand the world (and Universe), often from childhood. At one time science was not in the public eye, though technology has continually modified human existence. Now the activity of scientists, especially those in medicine, is widely known.

Scientists include theoreticians who never do experiments and experimentalists who do not do theory. Mathematics is usually grouped with the sciences although some take issue with this. Like other scientists, mathematicians start with hunches and then conduct symbolic or computational experiments to test them; and moreover, some of the greatest physicists have also been great mathematicians. There is a continuum from the most theoretical to the most empirical scientists, with no clear-cut boundaries. By personality, interests, training, and professional activity, there is little difference between applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists.

A number of scientists have also been priests, including the astronomer and physician Copernicus, and Gregor Mendel, whose discoveries on inheritance founded modern genetics, complemented by the work on evolution of Charles Darwin.

There are many notable examples of people who have moved back and forth among disciplines. Descartes not only invented analytic geometry, but formulated a theory of mechanics, and advanced ideas about the origins of animal movement and perception. Vision also interested the physicists Young and Helmholtz, who also studied optics, hearing and music. Newton extended Descartes' mathematics by inventing calculus (along with Leibniz). He was also the founder of classical mechanics, and investigated light and optics. Fourier founded a new branch of mathematics, infinite, periodic series, but studied heat flow and infrared radiation, and discovered the greenhouse effect. von Neumann, Turing, Khinchin, Markov and Wiener, all mathematicians, made major contributions to science, including the ideas behind computers and the foundations of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics. Claude Shannon, a theoretical engineer, founded modern information theory. (Many mathematically inclined scientists are also musicians.)

These individuals exhibited unrelenting curiosity about Nature, rather than an interest in wealth. Prestige, reputation and recognition by their peers are often much more important to scientists.

There are equally compelling stories in the history of medicine and biology, including the tale of Galen to Harvey regarding the circulation of blood. In the 19th century there was Pasteur's discovery that microorganisms can cause disease. A few years earlier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the American physician, poet and essayist, noted that sepsis in women following childbirth was spread by the hands of doctors and nurses, four years before Semmelweis did the same. The flowering of genetics and molecular biology in the 20th century is replete with famous names. Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his founding work in neuroscience.

Some see a dichotomy between experimental sciences, and purely "observational" sciences such as astronomy, meteorology, oceanography and seismology. But astronomers have done basic research in optics, charge-coupled devices, and in recent decades, have sent space probes to study other planets, in addition to using the Hubble Telescope to probe the origins of the Universe some 14 billion years ago. Microwave spectroscopy has now identified dozens of organic molecules in interstellar space, requiring laboratory experimentation and computer simulation to confirm the observational data, and starting a new branch of chemistry. Computer modeling and numerical methods are techniques required of students in every field of quantitative science.

Students considering science often look to the most exciting frontiers. These now include cosmology, and biology, especially molecular biology and the human genome project. Also, the exploration of matter at the scale of elementary particles, as represented by high-energy physics; and nanotechnology, which will surely advance electronics, including microscopic computers, and perhaps artificial intelligence. However, the nature of the mind and human thought still remain mysteries.

1 Scientists and engineers
2 Women in science
3 Types of scientists
4 See also
- 4.1 Related lists

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Scientists and engineers

There is also no clear-cut distinction between science and engineering. Scientists often perform engineering tasks in designing experimental equipment and building prototypes, and some engineers do first-rate scientific research. Both proceed from problems toward solutions, though engineers typically have practical goals in mind. while scientists investigate fundamental phenomena. But mechanical, electrical, chemical and aerospace engineers are often at the forefront of investigating new phenomena and materials. Peter Debye received a degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in physics before eventually winning a Nobel Prize in chemistry.

There's a marginal question about inventors. Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanization of rubber, but he had no formal training and his work was haphazard. Was Edison a scientist? Farther afield: Is an historian a scientist? A psychoanalyst?

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Women in science

While a majority of the earliest scientists were male, reflecting traditional gender roles, growing proportion of scientists are now women; and in some fields, such as biology, genetics, and mathematics, have made prominent contributions since the early 20th century. Controversially, Einstein's first wife, Mileva Marić, may have assisted in his 1905 special theory of relativity. Emmy Noether's theorem is one of the foundations of mathematical physics. In the 1840s Ada Lovelace worked on Charles Babbage's analytical computing engine; the Ada programming language is named her. From earlier times, there is Hypatia of Alexandria (circa 380-415 AD) and there may well have been others. All these women were mathematicians. Marie Curie, the only two-time winner of the Nobel Prize for science (chemistry and physics) was also involved in quantitative work.

As of 2005, women make up a majority of Ph.D. degree holders in psychology (67%) and the social sciences (59%), while remaining in the minority in biology (41%), geoscience (24%), physical sciences (22%), computer sciences (16%) and engineering (12%) [1].

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