Over the past 2,500 years, countless people have advanced the enterprise of science. By UNESCO’s estimate, about 8 million of them were at the task in 2013. They are the latest generation in a long lineage of knowledge seekers — but is there anyone we can call their common ancestor? Is there, in other words, a first scientist?
To some extent, it depends what you mean by “scientist.” The word itself dates back only to 1834, when the philosopher William Whewell coined it as an umbrella term for the practitioners of an ever-expanding plethora of sciences. The academic ranks were full of chemists, physicists, naturalists and mathematicians (not to mention their proliferating subsets), and Whewell sought to unite them under this new name.
