• Question: What would you define as a scientist?

    Asked by daisychainsaw to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 15 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      Anyone who does experiments to try and understand how nature works.

      This includes everything from how we think, to how living things work, to where the universe came from, to why grated cheese tastes better than ungrated cheese.

    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      Yikes, that a tough one. I guess I would define anyone who is trying to answer questions about nature using the scientific method — that is, by generating hypotheses and testing them in a reproducible fashion. I’m guessing that is too narrow a definition, though, and you can probably come up with lots of examples of scientists outside of its scope. Best I can come up with at the moment though!

      How would you define a scientist?

    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      Good question! I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary for help on this one and got:

      ‘1. A person with expert knowledge of a science; a person using scientific methods.’

      …which is sort of what I had in mind. It’s obvious that many people who work as scientists know a lot about science subjects like Chemistry or Physiology. However, many people who might not be scientists can have scientific approaches to all sorts of questions. If you have a hypothesis (e.g. ‘Coca-Cola and supermarket cola are equally tasty – it’s only the branding that makes people prefer Coke’), and you have an idea of how to test it (Pour a glass of each brand and get people to do a blind ‘taste test’, then measure how many people prefer Coke), that’s an experiment.

      So, if you either like learning about how the world works, or you like coming up with testable ideas and solving problems, you’d probably like being a scientist!

    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      I would say a scientist is someone who can support their conclusions with evidence. The evidence can be data that they obtained using research.

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