A few years ago I took part in a debate at the Royal Institution on ‘who was the first scientist?’

Lewis Wolpert championed Archimedes, I stood up for Roger Bacon (not entirely surprising having written a book about him called The First Scientist  and Frank James spoke for James Clerk Maxwell.

Archimedes won, with Bacon a close second. The arguments were loosely that Archimedes was the first to use maths in science, Bacon the first to emphasise the importance of experimental verification, maths and the communication of results, and Maxwell because the word ‘scientist’ wasn’t invented until his time.

I have my doubts about Archimedes. Although he was a great mathematician and engineer, he still had the ancient Greek tendency to ignore experiment and rely on pure argument. Some have disagreed about Bacon, because he was loose in his definition of experiment, including little more than ‘someone saw X’ as well as more formal experiments. But I would argue that you wouldn’t expect the first scientist to be a very good one! The first person to do everything is feeling their way.

I know it’s a very arbitrary point, but who out of all scientific history would you call the first, and why?