What is a good scientist?

Before I take one last look at the scientific method, what makes somebody a scientist? In the world of advertising, anybody pushing a treatment or cure and wearing a white coat is seen as a scientist, and most people who say they can refute Darwin, Einstein or “Big Pharma” will also claim to be a scientist — as will a goodly proportion of climate deniers.

Is it all about equipment? This is
Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg.

The term has been used since 1840 to describe people who study scientific subjects: “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist”, said William Whewell (1794 – 1866), writing in 1840. Before this date, scientists were usually referred to as natural philosophers.

In general, we expect that scientists will work in accordance with the scientific method, and that they will report their findings in such a way as to allow others to repeat the experiments they describe. There are also expectations that the work of a scientist will not be based on fraud, faith or pious hopes, and that the work will be properly notified in the “scientific literature”, that is, by a “paper”, a report published in a peer-reviewed journal devoted to such reports.

Most people see an advantage in calling their subject “a science”, while the “real scientists” prefer to keep science pure, so that “social sciences”, “political science”, and especially “creation science” are rejected by mainstream scientists, on the ground that these other “scientists” do not have a clear body of theory and laws which can be used to generate new experiments and studies.

That said, we can’t ignore the scientists, because they are strange beasts. Gilbert White, vicar of Selborne and Jane Austen’s near neighbour, had a gentleman amateur’s fascination with weather records. So did John Dalton, schoolmaster and amateur chemist, who gave us the modern notion of the atom in 1808. Dalton kept a weather diary for 57 years until he died in 1844.

Dolly Pentreath memorial, Mousehole, Cornwall.

White also corresponded with people like lawyer Daines Barrington who, among other things, examined the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to see if the boy was a clever hoax, managed by boy’s father. Barrington suggested in a report to the Royal Society that the lad was not only genuine, but likely to be greater than Händel. Barrington also interviewed the last speaker of Cornish, Dolly Pentreath, and had some original ideas about fossils and polar exploration. White wrote to him about the keys in which owls hooted at Selborne.

Gilbert White died in 1793, Daines Barrington in 1800, at a time when the men of science were still expected to commit themselves to a range of endeavour and enquiry. By the late 1850s, that era was over and the up-and-coming scientists had begun to specialise.

The names of those planning to attend the Leeds meeting of the British Association in 1858 were listed in The Times, ahead of the meeting. The list reads “Sir David Brewster, Professor Faraday, Sir Roderick Murchison, Dr Whewell, Professor Wheatstone, Professor Airy, Sir William Hamilton, Sir Benjamin Brodie, Robert Stephenson, M. P., General Chesney, Mr. Hopkins, Mr. Darwin …”.

Darwin’s name is followed by 33 others, few of them known today, even to those familiar with the period. Darwin was top-drawer, but not one of the truly great names like Astronomer Royal George Airy or William Whewell, the man who coined the word ‘scientist’.

Brodie (a surgeon who opposed amputating diseased joints), Chesney (Francis Rawdon Chesney, who surveyed a Suez Canal route in 1829) and Hopkins (probably William Hopkins, a mathematician, geologist and Cambridge coach), people barely heard-of today, were all mentioned ahead of Darwin, but like him, many of them entered science through a back door. It was a field that any determined person could enter.

Michael Faraday was a bookbinder’s apprentice who read then books he was binding, carried out some experiments, attended some lectures, and then joined the world of experimental science. Wheatstone first came to attention as a maker of musical instruments (and the inventor of the concertina) but he went on from there.

Brewster trained as a clergyman, and in 1825 Darwin was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh but was so horrified by an operation performed on a child without anaesthetic that he gave up his studies without completing the course. Scientists were not trained as such before about 1850: they emerged, and got together and talked, like the members of the Birmingham Lunar Society.

I suppose you want to know about them, well you should have been paying attention: I did them three weeks back!