It seems entirely natural to us that there are teams of scientists in universities and other institutions around the world attempting to discover the way the world works. However, it hasn't been that way. Although the scientific method is now four or five hundred years old, the ancient Greeks, for example, believed that they could work out the cause of natural events just by the power of thought.
During the 17th century, more and more people began to realise that they could test their ideas by designing a relevant experiment and seeing what happened. A lot of progress was in this way by individual scientists. These men and women often worked alone. carrying out research into many different areas of science, and they often received very little reward for their hard work. At the start of the 20th century, though, it became clear that science was becoming more complicated and more expensive. The individual scientist disappeared, to be replaced by highly qualified teams of experts. Modern science was born