I take your point. But actually, not so. 'Scientists' from the ancient Greeks until the 19th C were called natural philosophers, studying natural philosophy. The Greek philosophers all give their theories of the universe, they were the scientists of the day - maybe Socrates was the first to concern himself with just the human world. The word 'scientist' was coined only in 1834.

"Modern meanings of the terms science and scientists date only to the 19th century. Before that, science was a synonym for knowledge or study, in keeping with its Latin origin. The term gained its modern meaning when experimental science and the scientific method became a specialized branch of study apart from natural philosophy.

From the mid-19th century, when it became increasingly unusual for scientists to contribute to both physics and chemistry, "natural philosophy" came to mean just physics... chairs of Natural Philosophy established long ago at the oldest universities are nowadays occupied mainly by physics professors. Isaac Newton's book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), whose title translates to "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", reflects the then-current use of the words "natural philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature". Even in the 19th century, a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait, which helped define much of modern physics, was titled Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy#Origin_and_...

Yes. But by the 19th century the scientific process was already doing quite well at advancing our understanding of the universe. The philosophers of science of that era mostly wrote down and formalized what was already happening. It’s not like scientists suddenly started doing their experiments differently because of the advent of a formal philosophy of science. There were some improvements, but they were incremental not transformative.

Sure. I was merely pedantically trying to say that, although, yes, it's ridiculous to claim that Popper had any kind of role in creating the scientific method, strictly speaking it was philosophers that created it - natural philosophers. The separation of science and philosophy came later.

I guess I bother making the point, because that history was surprising to me when I first learnt about it.

Describing, defining & creating are very closely related, if you're creating a system of thought/debate. It's an institution.

Karl Popper obviously didn't create the method out of whole cloth, but the ideas he formalized & championed became a real platform. Nearly any scientist/science advocate (degrasse tysson, dawkins..) dealing with an "is this science" question paraphrases him Popper.

Philosophy is the study of concepts and you can have philosophy of science.