Computing the future
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5655067

Mar 23rd 2006

From The Economist print edition

The practice of science may be undergoing yet another revolution

WHAT makes a scientific revolution? Thomas Kuhn famously described it
as a "paradigm shift"-the change that takes place when one idea
is overtaken by another, usually through the replacement over time of
the generation of scientists who adhered to an old idea with another
that cleaves to a new one. These revolutions can be triggered by
technological breakthroughs, such as the construction of the first
telescope (which overthrew the Aristotelian idea that heavenly bodies
are perfect and unchanging) and by conceptual breakthroughs such as the
invention of calculus (which allowed the laws of motion to be
formulated). This week, a group of computer scientists claimed that
developments in their subject will trigger a scientific revolution of
similar proportions in the next 15 years.

That claim is not being made lightly. Some 34 of the world's leading
biologists, physicists, chemists, Earth scientists and computer
scientists, led by Stephen Emmott, of Microsoft Research in Cambridge,
Britain, have spent the past eight months trying to understand how
future developments in computing science might influence science as a
whole. They have concluded, in a report called "Towards 2020
Science", that computing no longer merely helps scientists with their
work. Instead, its concepts, tools and theorems have become integrated
into the fabric of science itself. Indeed, computer science produces
"an orderly, formal framework and exploratory apparatus for other
sciences," according to George Djorgovski, an astrophysicist at the
California Institute of Technology.

Is the wakening giant a monster?
http://tinyurl.com/iws6


A Blueprint for the Future
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/a8545c8e949926bc