GREEN CARDAMOMS/Gaurangi Maitra
THE WORD scientist is so deeply embedded in our vocabulary and consciousness, that the fact it only found acceptance in common usage about 180 years ago comes as a surprise. After all we have been taught that Newton, Copernicus and their kind were all scientists. What we were not told is that we called them scientists from our retrospective point of view. As the science mad 19th century progressed, the prevalent term of natural philosopher seemed inadequate for the growing new breed of cultivators of science and the simultaneous proliferation of the subjects. We believe this issue was brought up at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet-philosopher objected to the fact that the members BAAS should be called philosophers. Then term savants was suggested but turned down on account of its being rather presumptuous and too French! Finally, the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, William Whewell in quick reasoned rebuttal told the gathering if practitioners of art were artists, then practitioners of science should be scientists. Thus the person, time, date, place and occasion which lead to the term scientist being coined, is known to us. Of course this does not exclude any other earlier or subsequent event but does seem to be the more definitive and better known coinage. The opening chapter of Laura J Synder’s book The Philosophical Breakfast Club captures the spirit of this event perfectly by calling the chapter, “Inventing the Scientist”! It makes one question whether Coleridge thought the cultivators of science did not deserve the appellation philosopher or was the time ripe for a new identity? History of science points towards the latter.
The basic frame work of science and its practitioners underwent a sea change in the 19th century. If it became more institutionalised, it also became more independent and specialised. The space within which a scientist worked changed in accordance with his discipline and methodology. Increasingly, scientific output had a commercial value post industrial revolution. Science talks, publications, exhibitions, debates acquired higher visibility than ever before driven by the publish-or-perish dictum. The scientist was taking on a new identity which to my mind paralleled that of Sherlock Holmes, invented in the same century.
One of the first books I read from the collection at home was a beautiful Folio Society edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I was simply swept up by the sheer ingenuity of his powers of detection (read discovery). Brougham rides through London, from 221B Baker’s Street, to confirm or disprove theories built up from tiny clues like cigar ash, mud on shoes and a hundred other leads. Deductions (as Holmes called them) were data based and helped to resolve the irresolvable as did the experiment and measurable proof based method of the scientist. Fact and fiction seemed to draw from each other. Holmes the brilliant, the single minded in pursuit, the idiosyncratic, the institution within an institution, with the magician like ability to say, ”Elementary, my dear Watson” leaving the population at large wondering why they had not thought of it before!
This image fits in well with what is expected from practitioners of science and one that any scientist worth his salt would be glad to have or at least cultivate. Remove the bowler hat, perhaps put on a white lab coat, add spectacles keep the magnifying glass and attitude intact, maybe grow a beard and you have the all the markers that would become the portrait of a “scientist” at work! Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1868 photograph of Charles Darwin is a perfect example of the bearded visage carefully dressed and postured for public consumption and posterity. Beards generally reigned supreme (in a largely masculine world) till Einstein’s perennially ruffled hair became the fashion icon for scientists and the beard lost out. ([email protected])