Hi guys I'm about to take a computer science degree michigan state university and was wondering when I am done will I be able to call myself a scientist?
>>4 that would be fraudulant and disengenuous, dont you think. also rather niggerish
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Anonymous2011-11-16 20:41
Computer Science is a terrible name for this business. First of all it's not a science. It might be Engineering or it might be Art. But we will actually see that computer so-called science has a lot in common with magic.
So it's not a science; it's also not really very much about computers; and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators; and biology is not really about microscopes and Petri dishes. It's not about computers in the same sense that geometry is not really about using surveying instruments.
In fact there's a lot of commonality between computer science and geometry - geometry first of all is another subject with a lousy name. Geometry (gaia: the earth, metron: to measure) originally meant "measuring the Earth" or "surveying". And the reason for that was that thousands of years ago the Egyptian priesthood developed the rudiments of geometry in order to figure out how to restore the boundaries of fields that were destroyed in the annual flooding of the Nile. To the Egyptians who did that geometry really was about the use of surveying instruments.
Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments, and that is when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you are doing with the tools you use. And indeed at some absolute scale of things we probably know less about the essence of computer science than the ancient Egyptians really knew about geometry.
Well, what do I mean about the essence of computer science, what do I mean about the essence of geometry? Well it is certainly true that these Egyptians went off and used surveying instruments, but when we look back on them after a couple of thousand years we say "Gee, what they were doing, was begin to formalize notions about space and time - to start a way of talking about mathematical truths formally - that lead to the axiomatic method, that lead to sort of all of modern mathematics". Figuring out a way to talk precisely about so-called declarative knowledge: "What is True".
Well similarly in the future people will look back and say "yes those primitives in the 20th century were fiddling around with these gadgets called computers, but really what they were doing is starting to learn how to formalize intuitions about process; how to do things; starting to develop a way to talk precisely about How To knowledge".
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Anonymous2011-11-16 20:54
>>6
In my dictionary, the preferred definition of science involves discovering properties of the natural world. Engineering involves the application of those properties to solve practical problems. By those definitions programmers are neither scientists nor engineers. The principal objects of their study are manmade, not natural. -- William A. Wulf, Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences
I think one day we will be able to produce oil in the same way we can now make diamonds, but through methods related to how oil becomes oil. Also I am cooking some spaghetti, all spaghetti starts off straight but when it gets hot it gets bent as fuck!