I don't think you understand what it is to be a scientist. Einstein didn't win a Nobel Prize for simply thinking about the photoelectric effect, he used math and built upon another theory by Max Planck and his paper was able to be verified and he gave ways in which experiments can and were devised to show his equations were accurate.
You also seem to be unaware of Einstein's history as he had a diploma to teach physics at the Polytechnic in Switzerland prior to his 1905 papers. He studied science and wrote scientific papers even prior to the Annus Mirabilis yet you seem to want to label him as a non-scientist.
Einstein, Susskind and Lisi (the plumber and surfer) are all scientists regardless of what else they accomplish. Being a scientist doesn't mean that you have letters after your name, being a scientist means you understand and follow the scientific method in your search for the truth.
When I speak of non-scientists, I am speaking of forum denizens that have taken a class or two and think they are suddenly experts as seems to happen in many specialty areas. They are the ones that will repeat their misunderstanding about facts, laws and theories making it sound as if theories at some point become elevated to scientific fact or that laws cannot be broken and will always be true, etc.
I'm also talking about you, by implying some astounding insight just happened to come to a plumber or a surfer dude one day and they didn't put in a lot of hard work into their papers and their methods were somehow 'outside' of science.
I'm also talking about those non-scientists liars-for-Jesus such as Ken Ham and Kent Hovind that distort what science actually is for their own ends. Unfortunately their popularity is such that some of their nonsense actually ends up being repeated as fact often enough to be noticed.
I know the history and I understand he didn't fairytale a theory up. And no, if having a diploma in the science/physics field qualifies you as a scientist then all the same, my point was that he wasn't an acknowledged scientist and he wasn't teaching. And if the point your making is to say he was a qualified scientist, then every junior/high-school teacher must be a scientist as well. I also compared the surfer and plumber not to say, they just fantasized their theories up and didn't put work into them, but yes in a sense that's what they did. The math could only take them so far. They used thought experiments & personal observable experience to spark new ideas and concepts, which they later went back to construct in mathematical terminology that I agree is the hard part.
I'm sorry if I misunderstood the scientific process, but I was under the impression that creative thinking and personal observations wasn't inclusive to the process. I thought it was a method of following information and not straying away from it, which kept you from heading in the wrong direction. Einstein didn't use Math to spark new ideas, he used thought experiments and personal observations that inspired him to refute Newtons theory . He was not an acknowledged scientists in any special field, just as the life-long plumber and a surfer weren't. Once again are you implying that a surfer/plumber isn't capable of providing reputable scientific standards of work? Because I made no implications that they did not put in the work, I simply said that they were not considered scientists in the general accepted or, technical sense. And if the above stands true to your meaning of scientist then I'm a scientist too, I hold diplomas in physics.
edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientist
I'm using this definition of Scientist and it describes the different context I think we are using. And by this definition the Surfer, Plumber, and E=MC2 were not Scientist by its restricted meaning, until they proved something that was already true. And only one has been able to demostrate with evidence while the others only provide incomplete math, but that isn't to say its not hypothetically sound with the present math involved.
I apologize for responding in Droid, so I'm cleaning it up to allow a better understanding as to what I previously said. And, I see your point about titles; I Am a Scientist in the broad sense, as well as the field listed. It wasn't just your opinion of me after all ..
