Biographies

What's a scientist?

Here's a question you may have wondered about. What makes a scientist? Is it just a matter of college education? An official degree hanging on the wall? Not really. College helps scientists most of the time. But, some of the greatest scientists in the history were not college graduates.

So, what makes a scientist? Many things. A scientist is someone who studies the way things work in nature. A scientist thinks about the history of science and what other scientsts have already found out about the way nature works. A scientist then uses this "old knowledge" to help make new discoveries -- new discoveries that depend on an idea that separates scientists from other thinkers -- the idea of "scientific method."

What's the scientific method? It's a process -- a series of steps sceintists use to learn about the way nature works. The first step is stating a hypothesis - which is a guess about the way something works, based on observation of the thing working. For example, you could state the hypothesis (make the guess) that your dog likes dog food brand A better than brand B or C. To figure out if you're right, you'd take the next step - testing the hypothesis by feeding your dog and watching to see which kind of food it eats quickest. As you test your guess, you take the third step which is collecting data -- writing down the facts about your tests, how much food your dog eats, how fast it eats and so forth. The next step is analyzing the data - which means stuyding the facts you wrote down. For instance, how many times did your dog eat brand A faster htan brand B or C? This studying of facts leads to the final step of scientific method which is drawing conclusions. What do the facts tell you? Was your guess right?

Here are a few famous scientists that knew how to use the scientific method:

Archimedes
Arrhenius, Svante August
Bernoulli, Daniel
Bohr, Neils
Crookes, Sir William
Dalton, John
Einstein, Albert
Feynman, Richard Phillips
Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis
Hawking, Stephen William
Joule, James Prescott
Kelvin, William Thomson
Kirchhoff, Gustav Rober
Mendeleyev, Dmitry Ivanovich
Millikan, Robert Andrews
Newton, Sir Isaac
Oersted, Hans Christian
Oppenheimer, J. Robert
Priestley, Joseph
Rutherford, Ernest

Encyclopedia

Acids and Bases
Archimedes' Principle
Atoms
Bernoulli's Principle
Chemical Formulas
Chemical Reactions
Compounds and Mixtures
Energy
Force
Forms of Energy
Gravity
Mass
Matter
Nobel Prizes