Isaac Newton's name is irrevocably linked to the Laws of Motion. Albert Einstein's name is irrevocably linked to the photoelectric effect. As a result of the work of Newton and Einstein who are prototypes of "The Right Man In the Right Place at the Right Time," i.e., their social and cultural environments were conducive----despite adverse historical contexts (Newton took refuge at his widowedmother's farm from the plague in London and Cambridge University; Einstein chose between the Soviet Union of Russia and the United States of America during the between-the-world-wars-nuclear race among Japan [had the formula but not the uranium for the bomb], USA [had everything including Oppenheimer], Germany and Russia [had access to uranium but incomplete resources to make the bomb], and China [had access to uranium but no formula to make the bomb]----to historic intellectual contributions to human society made by the exceptional minds of men educated in science and mathematics, i.e., Newton and Einstein. But did Newton and Einstein discover things that were already at work in the solar system? Or should they be credited with being "inventors" as well as "scientists"?
An inventor is a person who makes a scientific discovery or discovers a new commercial application of existing theory in practice. But it's more a legal definition. Colloquially the invention is something invented and created by man from the beginning to the end, so that someone else can use it. I would rather say that they are discoverers as well as scientists. Because they have described and experimentally proved observations of a physical phenomenons occurring in nature that no one has noticed before. It could not have been invented because it existed before, only man did not know it or realize it.
They discover them because they have existed from time immemorial to the present. Natural laws are uninventible because humans have no capacity or capability to invent natures' wonders.
You may invent the steam engine, but not the laws of thermodynamics. You can discover them only. Well, unless you are God omnipotent.
Galileo as a scientist realized that objects of different masses accelerated in the same way, due to gravity and as an inventor, built the first thermometer
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