University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1582, is the sixth oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's ancient universities. The university has five main campuses in the city of Edinburgh, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university; the university played an important role in leading Edinburgh to its reputation as a chief intellectual centre during the Age of Enlightenment, helped give the city the nickname of the Athens of the North. The University of Edinburgh is ranked 18th in the world by the 2019 QS World University Rankings, it is ranked as the 6th best university in Europe by the U. S. News' Best Global Universities Ranking, 7th best in Europe by the Times Higher Education Ranking; the Research Excellence Framework, a research ranking used by the UK government to determine future research funding, ranked Edinburgh 4th in the UK for research power, 11th overall. It is ranked the 78th most employable university in the world by the 2017 Global Employability University Ranking.
It is a member of both the Russell Group, the League of European Research Universities, a consortium of 21 research universities in Europe. It has the third largest endowment of any university in the United Kingdom, after the universities of Cambridge and Oxford; the annual income of the institution for 2017–18 was £949.0 million of which £279.7 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £931.3 million. Alumni of the university include some of the major figures of modern history, including 3 signatories of the American declaration of independence and 9 heads of state; as of March 2019, Edinburgh's alumni, faculty members and researches include 19 Nobel laureates, 3 Turing Award laureates, 1 Fields Medalist, 1 Abel Prize winner, 2 Pulitzer Prize winners, 2 currently-sitting UK Supreme Court Justices, several Olympic gold medallists. It continues to have links to the British Royal Family, having had the Duke of Edinburgh as its Chancellor from 1953 to 2010 and Princess Anne since 2011.
Edinburgh receives 60,000 applications every year, making it the second most popular university in the UK by volume of applications. It has 4th highest average UCAS entry tariff in Scotland, 5th overall in the UK. Founded by the Edinburgh Town Council, the university began life as a college of law using part of a legacy left by a graduate of the University of St Andrews, Bishop Robert Reid of St Magnus Cathedral, Orkney. Through efforts by the Town Council and Ministers of the City the institution broadened in scope and became formally established as a college by a Royal Charter, granted by King James VI of Scotland on 14 April 1582 after the petitioning of the Council; this was unprecedented in newly Presbyterian Scotland, as older universities in Scotland had been established through Papal bulls. Established as the "Tounis College", it opened its doors to students in October 1583. Instruction began under the charge of another St Andrews graduate Robert Rollock, it was the fourth Scottish university in a period when the richer and much more populous England had only two.
It was renamed King James's College in 1617. By the 18th century, the university was a leading centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. In 1762, Reverend Hugh Blair was appointed by King George III as the first Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres; this formalised literature as a subject at the university and the foundation of the English Literature department, making Edinburgh the oldest centre of literary education in Britain. Before the building of Old College to plans by Robert Adam implemented after the Napoleonic Wars by the architect William Henry Playfair, the University of Edinburgh existed in a hotchpotch of buildings from its establishment until the early 19th century; the university's first custom-built building was the Old College, now Edinburgh Law School, situated on South Bridge. Its first forte in teaching was anatomy and the developing science of surgery, from which it expanded into many other subjects. From the basement of a nearby house ran the anatomy tunnel corridor.
It went under what was North College Street, under the university buildings until it reached the university's anatomy lecture theatre, delivering bodies for dissection. It was from this tunnel. Towards the end of the 19th century, Old College was becoming overcrowded and Sir Robert Rowand Anderson was commissioned to design new Medical School premises in 1875; the design incorporated a Graduation Hall, but this was seen as too ambitious. A separate building was constructed for the purpose, the McEwan Hall designed by Anderson, after funds were donated by the brewer and politician Sir William McEwan in 1894, it was presented to the University in 1897. New College was opened in 1846 as a Free Church of Scotland college of the United Free Church of Scotland. Since the 1930s it has been the home of the School of Divinity. Prior to the 1929 reunion of the Church of Scotland, candidates for the ministry in the United Free Church studied at New College, whilst candidates for the old Church of Scotland studied in the Divinity Faculty of the University of Edinburgh.
During the 1930s the two institutions came together. By the end of the 1950s, there were around 7,000 students matriculating annually. An Edinburgh Students' Representative Council was founded in 1884 by student Robert Fitzroy Bell. In 1889, the SRC voted to be housed in Teviot Row House; the Edinburgh University Sports Union, founded in 1866. The Edinburgh
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past, is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race. If the individual is concerned with events preceding written history, the individual is a historian of prehistory; some historians are recognized by training and experience. "Historian" became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century as research universities were emerging in Germany and elsewhere. During the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial, it became evident that the court needed to identify what was an "objective historian" in the same vein as the reasonable person, reminiscent of the standard traditionally used in English law of "the man on the Clapham omnibus"; this was necessary so that there would be a legal bench mark to compare and contrast the scholarship of an objective historian against the illegitimate methods employed by David Irving, as before the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial, there was no legal precedent for what constituted an objective historian.
Justice Gray leant on the research of one of the expert witnesses, Richard J. Evans, who compared illegitimate distortion of the historical record practice by holocaust deniers with established historical methodologies. By summarizing Gray's judgement, in an article published in the Yale Law Journal, Wendie E. Schneider distils these seven points for what he meant by an objective historian: The historian must treat sources with appropriate reservations. Schneider uses the concept of the "objective historian" to suggest that this could be an aid in assessing what makes an historian suitable as an expert witnesses under the Daubert standard in the United States. Schneider proposed this, because, in her opinion, Irving could have passed the standard Daubert tests unless a court was given "a great deal of assistance from historians". Schneider proposes that by testing an historian against the criteria of the "objective historian" even if an historian holds specific political views, providing the historian uses the "objective historian" standards, he or she is a "conscientious historian".
It was Irving's failure as an "objective historian" not his right wing views that caused him to lose his libel case, as a "conscientious historian" would not have "deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" to support his political views. The process of historical analysis involves investigation and analysis of competing ideas and purported facts to create coherent narratives that explain "what happened" and "why or how it happened". Modern historical analysis draws upon other social sciences, including economics, politics, anthropology and linguistics. While ancient writers do not share modern historical practices, their work remains valuable for its insights within the cultural context of the times. An important part of the contribution of many modern historians is the verification or dismissal of earlier historical accounts through reviewing newly discovered sources and recent scholarship or through parallel disciplines like archaeology. Understanding the past appears to be a universal human need, the telling of history has emerged independently in civilizations around the world.
What constitutes history is a philosophical question. The earliest chronologies date back to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, though no historical writers in these early civilizations were known by name. Systematic historical thought emerged in ancient Greece, a development that became an important influence on the writing of history elsewhere around the Mediterranean region; the earliest known critical historical works were The Histories, composed by Herodotus of Halicarnassus who became known as the "father of history". Herodotus attempted to distinguish between more and less reliable accounts, conducted research by travelling extensively, giving written accounts of various Mediterranean cultures. Although Herodotus' overall emphasis lay on the actions and characters of men, he attributed an important role to divinity in the determination of historical events. Thucydides eliminated divine causality in his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, establishing a rationalistic element that set a precedent for subsequent Western historical writings.
He was the first to distinguish between cause and immediate origins of an event, while his successor Xenophon introduced autobiographical elements and character studies in his Anabasis. The Romans adopted the Greek tradition. While early Roman works were still written in Greek, the Origines, composed by the Roman statesman Cato the Elder, was written in Latin, in a conscious effort to counteract Greek cultural influence. Strabo was an important exponent of the Greco-Roman tradition of combining geography with history, presenting a descriptive history of peoples and places known to his era. Livy (59 BCE
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is a family of consequentialist ethical theories. Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea behind all of them is to in some sense maximize utility, defined in terms of well-being or related concepts. For instance, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described utility as that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, pleasure, good, or happiness... to prevent the happening of mischief, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered. Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism and altruism, utilitarianism considers the interests of all beings equally. Proponents of utilitarianism have disagreed on a number of points, such as whether actions should be chosen based on their results or whether agents should conform to rules that maximize utility.
There is disagreement as to whether total, average or minimum utility should be maximized. Though the seeds of the theory can be found in the hedonists Aristippus and Epicurus, who viewed happiness as the only good, the tradition of utilitarianism properly began with Bentham, has included John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, R. M. Hare, David Braybrooke, Peter Singer, it has been applied to social welfare economics, the crisis of global poverty, the ethics of raising animals for food and the importance of avoiding existential risks to humanity. Benthamism, the utilitarian philosophy founded by Jeremy Bentham, was modified by his successor John Stuart Mill, who popularized the word'Utilitarianism'. In 1861, Mill acknowledged in a footnote that, though "believing himself to be the first person who brought the word'utilitarian' into use, he did not invent it. Rather, he adopted it from a passing expression in" John Galt's 1821 novel Annals of the Parish. Mill seems to have been unaware that Bentham had used the term'utilitarian' in his 1781 letter to George Wilson and his 1802 letter to Étienne Dumont.
The importance of happiness as an end for humans has long been recognized. Forms of hedonism were put forward by Epicurus. Happiness was explored in depth by Aquinas. Different varieties of consequentialism existed in the ancient and medieval world, like the state consequentialism of Mohism or the political philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli. Mohist consequentialism advocated communitarian moral goods including political stability, population growth, wealth, but did not support the utilitarian notion of maximizing individual happiness. Utilitarianism as a distinct ethical position only emerged in the eighteenth century. Although utilitarianism is thought to start with Jeremy Bentham, there were earlier writers who presented theories that were strikingly similar. In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume writes: In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public utility is principally in view. If any false opinion, embraced from appearances, has been found to prevail.
Hume studied the works of, corresponded with, Francis Hutcheson, it was he who first introduced a key utilitarian phrase. In An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Hutcheson says when choosing the most moral action, virtue is in proportion to the number of people a particular action brings happiness to. In the same way, moral evil, or vice, is proportionate to the number of people made to suffer; the best action is the one that procures the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers—and the worst is the one that causes the most misery. In the first three editions of the book, Hutcheson included various mathematical algorithms "...to compute the Morality of any Actions." In this, he pre-figured the hedonic calculus of Bentham. Some claim. In Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality, Gay argues that: happiness, private happiness, is the proper or ultimate end of all our actions… each particular action may be said to have its proper and peculiar end……, they still ought to tend to something farther.
To ask why I pursue happiness, will admit of no other answer than an explanation of the terms. This pursuit of happiness is given a theological basis: Now it is evident from the nature of God, viz. his being infinitely happy in himself from all eternity, from his goodness manifested in his works, that he could have no other design in creating mankind than their happiness.
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, man of letters, civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse. Writing in English, Latin and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, his celebrated Areopagitica, written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, his desire for freedom extended into his style: he introduced new words to the English language, was the first modern writer to employ non-rhymed verse outside of the theatre or translations. William Hayley's 1796 biography called him the "greatest English author", he remains regarded "as one of the preeminent writers in the English language", though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death. Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as "a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind", though he described Milton's politics as those of an "acrimonious and surly republican".
Poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy revered him. The phases of Milton's life parallel the major political divisions in Stuart Britain. Milton studied, wrote poetry for private circulation, launched a career as pamphleteer and publicist under the personal rule of Charles I and its breakdown into constitutional confusion and war; the shift in accepted attitudes in government placed him in public office under the Commonwealth of England, from being thought dangerously radical and heretical, he acted as an official spokesman in certain of his publications. The Restoration of 1660 deprived Milton, now blind, of his public platform, but this period saw him complete most of his major works of poetry. Milton's views developed from his extensive reading, as well as travel and experience, from his student days of the 1620s to the English Civil War. By the time of his death in 1674, Milton was impoverished and on the margins of English intellectual life, yet famous throughout Europe and unrepentant for his political choices.
John Milton was born in Bread Street, London on 9 December 1608, the son of composer John Milton and his wife Sarah Jeffrey. The senior John Milton moved to London around 1583 after being disinherited by his devout Catholic father Richard "the Ranger" Milton for embracing Protestantism. In London, the senior John Milton married Sarah Jeffrey and found lasting financial success as a scrivener, he lived in and worked from a house on Bread Street, where the Mermaid Tavern was located in Cheapside. The elder Milton was noted for his skill as a musical composer, this talent left his son with a lifelong appreciation for music and friendships with musicians such as Henry Lawes. Milton's father's prosperity provided his eldest son with a private tutor, Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian with an M. A. from the University of St. Andrews. Research suggests. After Young's tutorship, Milton attended St Paul's School in London. There he began the study of Latin and Greek, the classical languages left an imprint on both his poetry and prose in English.
Milton's first datable compositions are two psalms done at age 15 at Long Bennington. One contemporary source is the Brief Lives of John Aubrey, an uneven compilation including first-hand reports. In the work, Aubrey quotes Christopher, Milton's younger brother: "When he was young, he studied hard and sat up late till twelve or one o'clock at night". Aubrey adds, ""His complexion exceeding faire—he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College."In 1625, Milton began attending Christ's College, Cambridge. He graduated with a B. A. in 1629, ranking fourth of 24 honours graduates that year in the University of Cambridge. Preparing to become an Anglican priest, Milton stayed on and obtained his Master of Arts degree on 3 July 1632. Milton may have been rusticated in his first year for quarrelling with his tutor, Bishop William Chappell, he was at home in London in the Lent Term 1626. Based on remarks of John Aubrey, Chappell "whipt" Milton; this story is now disputed, though Milton disliked Chappell.
Historian Christopher Hill cautiously notes that Milton was "apparently" rusticated, that the differences between Chappell and Milton may have been either religious or personal. It is possible that, like Isaac Newton four decades Milton was sent home because of the plague, by which Cambridge was badly affected in 1625. In 1626, Milton's tutor was Nathaniel Tovey. At Cambridge, Milton was on good terms with Edward King, for whom he wrote "Lycidas", he befriended Anglo-American dissident and theologian Roger Williams. Milton tutored Williams in Hebrew in exchange for lessons in Dutch. Despite developing a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition, Milton experienced alienation from his peers and university life as a whole. Having once watched his fellow students attempting comedy upon the college stage, he observed'they thought themselves gallant men, I thought them fools'. Milton was disdainful of the university curriculum, which consisted of
Ethics
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct. The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value, thus comprises the branch of philosophy called axiology. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil and wrong, virtue and vice and crime; as a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, value theory. Three major areas of study within ethics recognized today are: Meta-ethics, concerning the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions, how their truth values can be determined Normative ethics, concerning the practical means of determining a moral course of action Applied ethics, concerning what a person is obligated to do in a specific situation or a particular domain of action The English word "ethics" is derived from the Ancient Greek word ēthikós, meaning "relating to one's character", which itself comes from the root word êthos meaning "character, moral nature".
This was borrowed into Latin as ethica and into French as éthique, from which it was borrowed into English. Rushworth Kidder states that "standard definitions of ethics have included such phrases as'the science of the ideal human character' or'the science of moral duty'". Richard William Paul and Linda Elder define ethics as "a set of concepts and principles that guide us in determining what behavior helps or harms sentient creatures"; the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy states that the word "ethics" is "commonly used interchangeably with'morality'... and sometimes it is used more narrowly to mean the moral principles of a particular tradition, group or individual." Paul and Elder state that most people confuse ethics with behaving in accordance with social conventions, religious beliefs and the law and don't treat ethics as a stand-alone concept. The word ethics in English refers to several things, it can refer to philosophical ethics or moral philosophy—a project that attempts to use reason to answer various kinds of ethical questions.
As the English philosopher Bernard Williams writes, attempting to explain moral philosophy: "What makes an inquiry a philosophical one is reflective generality and a style of argument that claims to be rationally persuasive." Williams describes the content of this area of inquiry as addressing the broad question, "how one should live". Ethics can refer to a common human ability to think about ethical problems, not particular to philosophy; as bioethicist Larry Churchill has written: "Ethics, understood as the capacity to think critically about moral values and direct our actions in terms of such values, is a generic human capacity." Ethics can be used to describe a particular person's own idiosyncratic principles or habits. For example: "Joe has strange ethics." Meta-ethics is the branch of philosophical ethics that asks how we understand, know about, what we mean when we talk about what is right and what is wrong. An ethical question pertaining to a particular practical situation—such as, "Should I eat this particular piece of chocolate cake?"—cannot be a meta-ethical question.
A meta-ethical question is abstract and relates to a wide range of more specific practical questions. For example, "Is it possible to have secure knowledge of what is right and wrong?" is a meta-ethical question. Meta-ethics has always accompanied philosophical ethics. For example, Aristotle implies that less precise knowledge is possible in ethics than in other spheres of inquiry, he regards ethical knowledge as depending upon habit and acculturation in a way that makes it distinctive from other kinds of knowledge. Meta-ethics is important in G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica from 1903. In it he first wrote about. Moore was seen to reject naturalism in his Open Question Argument; this made. Earlier, the Scottish philosopher David Hume had put forward a similar view on the difference between facts and values. Studies of how we know in ethics divide into non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivism is the view that when we judge something as morally right or wrong, this is neither true nor false. We may, for example, be only expressing our emotional feelings about these things.
Cognitivism can be seen as the claim that when we talk about right and wrong, we are talking about matters of fact. The ontology of ethics is about value-bearing things or properties, i.e. the kind of things or stuff referred to by ethical propositions. Non-descriptivists and non-cognitivists believe that ethics does not need a specific ontology since ethical propositions do not refer; this is known as an anti-realist position. Realists, on the other hand, must explain what kind of entities, properties or states are relevant for ethics, how they have value, why they guide and motivate our actions. Normative ethics is the study of ethical action, it is the branch of ethics that investigates the set of questions that arise when considering how one ought to act, morally speaking. Normative ethics is distinct from meta-ethics because normative ethics examines standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, while meta-ethics studies the meaning of moral language and the metaphysics of moral facts.
Normative ethics is distinct from descriptive ethics, as the latter is an empirical investigation of people's moral beliefs. To put it another way, descriptive ethics would be concerned with determining what proportion of people believe th
Quakers
Quakers called Friends, are a Christian group of religious movements formally known as the Religious Society of Friends, Society of Friends or Friends Church. Members of the various Quaker movements are all united in a belief in the ability of each human being to experientially access "the light within", or "that of God in every one"; some may profess the priesthood of all believers, a doctrine derived from the First Epistle of Peter. They include those with evangelical, holiness and traditional Quaker understandings of Christianity. There are Nontheist Quakers whose spiritual practice is not reliant on the existence of gods. To differing extents, the different movements that make up the Religious Society of Friends/Friends Church avoid creeds and hierarchical structures. In 2007, there were about 359,000 adult Quakers worldwide. In 2017, there were 377,557 adult Quakers, with 49% in Africa. Around 89% of Quakers worldwide belong to the "evangelical" and "programmed" branches of Quakerism—these Quakers worship in services with singing and a prepared message from the Bible, coordinated by a pastor.
Around 11% of Friends practice waiting worship, or unprogrammed worship, where the order of service is not planned in advance, is predominantly silent, may include unprepared vocal ministry from those present. Some meetings of both types have Recorded Ministers in their meetings—Friends recognised for their gift of vocal ministry; the first Quakers lived in mid-17th-century England. The movement arose from the Legatine-Arians and other dissenting Protestant groups, breaking away from the established Church of England; the Quakers the ones known as the Valiant Sixty, attempted to convert others to their understanding of Christianity, travelling both throughout Great Britain and overseas, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. Some of these early Quaker ministers were women, they based their message on the religious belief that "Christ has come to teach his people himself", stressing the importance of a direct relationship with God through Jesus Christ, a direct religious belief in the universal priesthood of all believers.
They emphasized a personal and direct religious experience of Christ, acquired through both direct religious experience and the reading and studying of the Bible. Quakers focused their private life on developing behaviour and speech reflecting emotional purity and the light of God. In the past, Quakers were known for their use of thee as an ordinary pronoun, refusal to participate in war, plain dress, refusal to swear oaths, opposition to slavery, teetotalism; some Quakers founded banks and financial institutions, including Barclays and Friends Provident. In 1947, the Quakers, represented by the British Friends Service Council and the American Friends Service Committee, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. During and after the English Civil War many dissenting Christian groups emerged, including the Seekers and others. A young man, George Fox, was dissatisfied with the teachings of the Church of England and non-conformists, he had a revelation that "there is one Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition", became convinced that it was possible to have a direct experience of Christ without the aid of an ordained clergy.
In 1652 he had a vision on Pendle Hill in Lancashire, England, in which he believed that "the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered". Following this he travelled around England, the Netherlands, Barbados preaching and teaching with the aim of converting new adherents to his faith; the central theme of his Gospel message was. His followers considered themselves to be the restoration of the true Christian church, after centuries of apostasy in the churches in England. In 1650, Fox was brought before the magistrates Gervase Bennet and Nathaniel Barton, on a charge of religious blasphemy. According to Fox's autobiography, Bennet "was the first that called us Quakers, because I bade them tremble at the word of the Lord", it is thought that Fox was referring to Isaiah 66:2 or Ezra 9:4. Thus, the name Quaker began as a way of ridiculing Fox's admonition, but became accepted and is used by some Quakers. Quakers described themselves using terms such as true Christianity, Children of the Light, Friends of the Truth, reflecting terms used in the New Testament by members of the early Christian church.
Quakerism gained a considerable following in England and Wales, the numbers increased to a peak of 60,000 in England and Wales by 1680. But the dominant discourse of Protestantism viewed the Quakers as a blasphemous challenge to social and political order, leading to official persecution in England and Wales under the Quaker Act 1662 and the Conventicle Act 1664; this was relaxed after the Declaration of Indulgence and stopped under the Act of Toleration 1689. One modern view of Quakerism at this time was that the relationship with Christ was encouraged through spiritualisation of human relations, "the redefinition of the Quakers as a holy tribe,'the family and household of God'". Together with Margaret Fell, the wife of Thomas Fell, the vice-chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and an eminent judge, Fox developed new conceptions of family and community that emphasised "holy conversation": speech and behaviour that reflected piety and love. With the restructuring of the family and household came new roles for wom
Chemist
A chemist is a scientist trained in the study of chemistry. Chemists study the composition of its properties. Chemists describe the properties they study in terms of quantities, with detail on the level of molecules and their component atoms. Chemists measure substance proportions, reaction rates, other chemical properties; the word'chemist' is used to address Pharmacists in Commonwealth English. Chemists use this knowledge to learn the composition and properties of unfamiliar substances, as well as to reproduce and synthesize large quantities of useful occurring substances and create new artificial substances and useful processes. Chemists may specialize in any number of subdisciplines of chemistry. Materials scientists and metallurgists share skills with chemists; the work of chemists is related to the work of chemical engineers, who are concerned with the proper design and evaluation of the most cost-effective large-scale chemical plants and work with industrial chemists on the development of new processes and methods for the commercial-scale manufacture of chemicals and related products.
The roots of chemistry can be traced to the phenomenon of burning. Fire was a mystical force that transformed one substance into another and thus was of primary interest to mankind, it was fire. After gold was discovered and became a precious metal, many people were interested to find a method that could convert other substances into gold; this led to the protoscience called alchemy. The word chemist is derived from an abbreviation of alchimista. Alchemists discovered many chemical processes. Chemistry as we know it today, was invented by Antoine Lavoisier with his law of conservation of mass in 1783; the discoveries of the chemical elements has a long history culminating in the creation of the periodic table by Dmitri Mendeleev. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry created in 1901 gives an excellent overview of chemical discovery since the start of the 20th century. Jobs for chemists require at least a bachelor's degree, but many positions those in research, require a Master of Science or a Doctor of Philosophy.
Most undergraduate programs emphasize mathematics and physics as well as chemistry because chemistry is known as "the central science", thus chemists ought to have a well-rounded knowledge about science. At the Master's level and higher, students tend to specialize in a particular field. Fields of specialization include biochemistry, nuclear chemistry, organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, polymer chemistry, analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, theoretical chemistry, quantum chemistry, environmental chemistry, thermochemistry. Postdoctoral experience may be required for certain positions. Workers whose work involves chemistry, but not at a complexity requiring an education with a chemistry degree, are referred to as chemical technicians; such technicians do such work as simpler, routine analyses for quality control or in clinical laboratories, having an associate degree. A chemical technologist has more education or experience than a chemical technician but less than a chemist having a bachelor's degree in a different field of science with an associate degree in chemistry or having the same education as a chemical technician but more experience.
There are degrees specific to become a chemical technologist, which are somewhat distinct from those required when a student is interested in becoming a professional chemist. A Chemical technologist is more involved in the management and operation of the equipment and instrumentation necessary to perform chemical analyzes than a chemical technician, they are part of the team of a chemical laboratory in which the quality of the raw material, intermediate products and finished products is analyzed. They perform functions in the areas of environmental quality control and the operational phase of a chemical plant. In addition to all the training given to chemical technologists in their respective degree, a chemist is trained to understand more details related to chemical phenomena so that the chemist can be capable of more planning on the steps to achieve a distinct goal via a chemistry-related endeavor; the higher the competency level achieved in the field of chemistry, the higher the responsibility given to that chemist and the more complicated the task might be.
Chemistry, as a field, have so many applications that different tasks and objectives can be given to workers or scientists with these different levels of education or experience. The specific title of each job varies from position to position, depending on factors such as the kind of industry, the routine level of the task, the current needs of a particular enterprise, the size of the enterprise or hiring firm, the philosophy and management principles of the hiring firm, the visibility of the competency and individual achievements of the one seeking employment, economic factors such as recession or economic depression, among other factors, so this makes it difficult to categorize the exact roles of these chemistry-related workers as standard for that given level of education; because of these factors affecting exact job titles with distinct responsibilities, some chemists might begin doing technician tasks while other chemists might begin doing more complicated tasks than those of a technician, such as tasks th
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. 19 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 453–454. Endnotes:
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the 
