Any new thoughts on scientists in a magical setting?
I think a lot of the question becomes... what
are the fundamental physics of your D&D world. Like when I run the game, the elements are Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Positive Energy, and Negative Energy because those
are the indivisible elements in the D&D world, and magic is basically an additional fundamental force that can affect things in extremely unpredictable ways.
So knowing our Earth's rules isn't necessarily useful. You might think that iron rusts because oxygen in the air reacts with the base metal and forms a ferrous oxide of some kind. But in D&D, the water attacks the fire that was added to the iron during the smelting and forging process or the air reacts with the earth that was purified by the smelting process, and this causes it to begin reverting to the base earth that it originally came from. And that's not an artistic description, that's
actually what happens.
In the past I've used this explanation to keep gunpowder unavailable. Even if you wanted to metagame, you couldn't Captain Kirk your way into a bomb because there's no reason for the process to be the same. Sulpher, carbon, and potassium nitrate don't exist similarly, even if they're called brimstone, charcoal, and saltpeter. The formula for black powder doesn't necessarily involve combining those things in any way, shape or form.