The word scientist was coined in 1834, in a review of a woman's book
For centuries people who studied nature were called natural philosophers or men of science. In 1834 William Whewell introduced the word scientist while reviewing On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences by Mary Somerville. Science itself is far older, with written roots in Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Science is a systematic way of building testable explanations about nature and society through a cycle of observation, hypothesis and testing against evidence. It divides into the natural sciences, studying the physical world, and the social sciences, studying people and societies; logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science form the formal sciences. In English the word dates from the fourteenth century, meaning the state of knowing, and comes via Anglo-Norman from the Latin scientia, knowledge. For a long time it simply meant knowledge or study in general.
There was no single birthplace. Scientific thinking developed gradually over tens of thousands of years in many forms, and women likely played a central role in prehistoric knowledge. Clear evidence arrives with writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia between about 3000 and 1200 BCE. Egyptians had a decimal counting system, practical geometry and a calendar, while their healing mixed drugs with prayers and rituals. Mesopotamians used the properties of natural chemicals to make pottery, glass, soap and metals, and studied animal anatomy, partly for divination.
Greek thinkers built on that inheritance. The Milesian school founded by Thales, continued by Anaximander and Anaximenes, first tried to explain nature without the supernatural. Socrates turned philosophy toward human affairs, Aristotle created a systematic programme in the fourth century BCE, and in the third century Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the planets circle the Sun. Classical investigators were usually wealthy men pursuing inquiries in their spare time. Positional number notation probably emerged along Indian trade routes between the third and fifth centuries CE and eventually became the world standard.
After the Western Roman Empire fell, knowledge of Greek ideas faded in Western Europe, though encyclopaedists such as Isidore of Seville kept much ancient learning alive. The recovery of Greek works and Islamic scholarship during the Renaissance revived natural philosophy, and the Scientific Revolution from the sixteenth century broke with older Greek ideas. Today research is mostly collaborative, run by teams in universities, government agencies and companies.
Source: Science
