I was reading Christianity Today and saw an article about a girl still in high school made a major scientific discovery and is being published in a peer-review journal.
So this made me think about the debate I had a while back about what a scientist is.
Is she a scientist? She made a fairly major discovery, and she is getting published in a major journal. But by most accounts (or accounts of people with upper level degrees) she shouldn’t have the tools yet to be a scientist. She should need years of schooling yet, and learn all the principals of her particular flavor of science before she can discover and analyze anything worth noting in a journal.
Which mostly makes me think that a scientist is actually a person who knows and employs the most basic of scientific principals to enlighten themselves and others or discover something for the sake of discovering it…even if it has already been discovered by someone else. Hell, if it is new to you, then who says you did less than the guy who first discovered it.
It helps that for all our knowledge, and all our collective scientific works, and detailed diagrams / models of things that there are still relatively simple correlations and patterns in the world that we have yet to find. Isn’t it great how many different things there are in the world for us to discover and observe?
All I think it takes to find something great out is some imagination, a passion, and the knowledge of how to work the scientific method. Hell, that is all some of the greats had, they didn’t have advanced degrees a lot of the time. That is what can make science great, and why I like the physics van. Personal discovery is often just as great and possibly more important in the long haul then major unique discoveries. Because w/o those little personal scientific discoveries, we wouldn’t have the passion to keep pushing to the limits.
Anyway, this is not to say anything bad about my friends w/ advanced degrees. I think that is important to. I know you couldn’t have a major engineering discovery w/o some kind of formal schooling, or genus level curiosity for advanced math *cough*John Carmack*cough*.