| abstract | - Tracing the origins of science is possible through the many important texts which have survived from history. However, the word scientist is relatively recent—first coined by William Whewell in the 19th century. Previously, people investigating nature called themselves natural philosophers. While empirical investigations of the natural world have been described since classical antiquity (for example, by Babylonian astronomers, Indian philosophers, Thales, Aristotle, and others), the dawn of modern science is generally traced back to the development of scientific methodology, which had been employed since the Middle Ages (for example, by Ibn al-Haytham, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī, and Roger Bacon) and gained more prominence in the early modern period, during what is known as the scientific revolution. Scientific methodology is considered to be so fundamental to modern science that some — especially philosophers of science and practicing scientists — consider earlier inquiries into nature to be pre-scientific. Traditionally, historians of science have defined science sufficiently broadly to include those inquiries.
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