I’d already known that “scientist” coined by William Whewell in the 19th century, but only today did I learn the context. The first scientist by name was Mary Somerville, and Whewell had to invent the term to describe her!
Months after the publication of Somerville’s Connexion, the English polymath William Whewell — then master of Trinity College, where Newton had once been a fellow, and previously pivotal in making Somerville’s Laplace book a requirement of the university’s higher mathematics curriculum — wrote a laudatory review of her work, in which he coined the word scientist to refer to her. The commonly used term up to that point — “man of science” — clearly couldn’t apply to a woman, nor to what Whewell considered “the peculiar illumination” of the female mind: the ability to synthesize ideas and connect seemingly disparate disciplines into a clear lens on reality. Because he couldn’t call her a physicist, a geologist, or a chemist — she had written with deep knowledge of all these disciplines and more — Whewell unified them all into scientist. Some scholars have suggested that he coined the term a year earlier in his correspondence with Coleridge, but no clear evidence survives. What does survive is his incontrovertible regard for Somerville, which remains printed in plain sight — in his review, he praises her as a “person of true science.”
He still managed to squeeze in some sexist stereotyping, but that’s cool. Read the whole article to find out what remarkable person Somerville was.
Somerville College, Oxford, was named in her honour. And it was going really well until they turned out one Margaret Hilda “Satan Herself” Roberts in the 1940s.
In Finnish and (AFAIK) in Swedish we just talk about “researchers”, because there’s no commonly used direct equivalent for “scientist”. At least in Finnish, the formulation “man of science” remained in use rather long, and is still used informally in reference to specific persons (also sometimes “woman of science”).
Here is a thread where Dmitry Medvedev predicts the collapse of the West next year. Medvedev is the former head of Russia.
He is also a bit of a loon.
I keep saying that Russia is what you get when internet trolls run a country.
And oh yeah, his first and main fan is Elon Musk.
Elon Musk has tilted so far in favor of Russia that he has become a security threat to the USA.
It’s similar in Norwegian. We do have “vitenskapsmann” (man of science), but “forsker” (researcher) is the most used term these days.
Well, my comment at #3 was meant for another thread.
Whatever, it is off topic but still amusing in a warped sort of way.
In Italian we use the word “scienziato”, which was coined in the XIVth c. as an adjective and later became a noun; thus it could be used both for men and women since the beginning, although I don’t know when it was first used for a woman.
Sommerville College has turned out a fair number of scientists including Dorothy Hodgkin.
Another one by the way was Valerie Todd Davies who specialized in spiders, Australian spiders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Todd_Davies
Thank you for this post. I followed the links and learned a lot.
We seem to have some of the same things we follow. (Surprise).
Brain Picking Weekly? (I recommend this to all followers of this blog. It’s free (though I support her). Maria Popova.
@ ^ ANB :
This blog :
https://www.themarginalian.org/
By this woman : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Popova
Who current post is this :
https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/12/26/jeanne-villepreux-power-argonaut/
rather apt one? Looks good. Thanks.
PS. Don’t Russians use “Academic” as meaning ‘scientist’ and is that gender neutral? I think they named quite a few of their ships after some with that title, yeah?
@8 and @9: Like many other people, Popova gets Emmy Noether wrong;
https://www.printmag.com/creative-voices/monday-marginalian-emmy-noether-symmetry-and-the-conservation-of-energy/
Noether’s work, while important, didn’t “make Einstein’s general relativity possible”.
The actual story: In 1915, Einstein and David Hilbert were racing to complete their work on the gravitational field equations, using different approaches. Hilbert’s approach involved mathematics in which Noether was an expert, and he asked her to look into his conjecture that energy is not conserved in general relativity.
The paper she wrote contains two theorems. The first is the one which has become known in theoretical physics as ‘Noether’s theorem’. For a wide class of theories (not including general relativity), it demonstrates a link between continuous symmetries and conservation laws. It took far too long for the importance of this theorem to be recognized.
The second theorem gives the proof of Hilbert’s conjecture. But it is not any kind of sine qua non for general relativity.
A translation of her paper can be found here;
https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0503066.pdf
As is Artist, Actor, Human.
@10. Rob Grigjanis : Thankyou. Good info.