Scientists, Physicians & Natural Philosophers

Scientists, physicians and natural philosophers pursued the study of the natural world by observation and experiment, chemistry, astronomy, physiology and physics, and are gathered here for that scientific standing even where their religion or their era's science and religion were closely entangled, as with Galileo's astronomy, Faraday's Sandemanian faith or Newton's own biblical chronology. A figure belongs here for the science rather than for a religious or esoteric claim, which is what separates this heading from the alchemists and occultists whose own inquiry into nature was avowedly magical.