Who was the very first Scientist?

[4GS]

Who is considered to have been the first Scientist?
Also, how does one define a scientist?
I've already asked this in quizzes + puzzles but it's drowning in a sea of crossword questions
TIA

[wendilla]

The First Scientist takes us back to thirteenth-century Europe, to the early years of the great universities, where learning was spiced with the danger of mob violence and a terrifyingly repressive religious censorship. Roger Bacon, a humble and devout English friar (not to be confused with the Elizabethan/Jacobean politician and philosopher Francis Bacon), seems an unlikely figure to challenge the orthodoxy of his day � yet this unworldly man risked his life to establish the basis for true scientific knowledge.

Born around 1220, Bacon was passionately interested in the natural world and how things worked. Banned from writing on such dangerous topics by his Order, it was only when a new Pope proved sympathetic that he began compiling his encyclopaedia of knowledge, on everything from optics to alchemy - the synopsis took him a year and ran to 800,000 words, but he was never to complete the work itself. Sadly, the enlightened Pope died before he could read Bacon's remarkable work, and Bacon was tried as a magician and incarcerated for ten years.

Legend transformed

[wendilla]

more of this can be found if you google it

[crazy legs]

A scientist would be someone wanting to know about how things work and why, and also trying to figure out. I'd say that because people have being doing this 4 thousands of years it would be impossible 2 know who the 1st scientist was.

[mibn2cweus]

Science as a method for discovering and understanding natural laws evolved over time

Scientists are the developers and practioners of the scientific method.

[jake-the-peg]

Bacon's a good answer from the modern context but you should consider people like Eratosthenes (3rd century BC)

He calculated the size of the Earth as 23,300 miles (correct answer 25,000) using the shadow of a stick and knowing the distisnce between two places.

http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu /lectures/gkastr1.html

But he didn't do the measuring himself he paid someone to measure the distance - You might consider therfore that he was the first theoretician basing his results on experimental evidence.

As for the first experimentalist well Bacon's a very Euro-centric answer.

Ibn al-Haytham predates him by a couple of hundred years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham.