Abstract
It has often been claimed that the computer has not only revolutionized everyday life but has also affected the sciences in a fundamental manner. Even in national systems of innovation which had initially reacted with a fair amount of reserve to the computer as a new scientific instrument (such as Germany and France; cf., e.g., [33,18]), it is today a commonplace to speak about the ”computer revolution” in the sciences [27]. In his path breaking book Revolution in Science, Cohen diagnoses that a general revolutionary change in the sciences had followed from the invention of the computer. While he asserts that the scientific revolution in astronomy in the 17th century was not based on the newly invented telescope but on the intellect of Galileo Galilei, he maintains in contrast that the ”case is different for the computer, which [. . . ] has affected the thinking of scientists and the formulation of theories in a fundamental way, as in the case of the new computer models for world meteorology” [10, pp. 9-10 & 20-22].
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Hashagen, U. (2013). The Computation of Nature, Or: Does the Computer Drive Science and Technology?. In: Bonizzoni, P., Brattka, V., Löwe, B. (eds) The Nature of Computation. Logic, Algorithms, Applications. CiE 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7921. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39053-1_30
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