Читать книгу Computation in Science (Second Edition) - Konrad Hinsen - Страница 12

The most visible role of computation in scientific research is its use as a tool. Experimentalists process their raw data, for example to correct for artifacts of their equipment. Then they fit a theoretical model to their data by adjusting parameters. Theoreticians compute numerical predictions from a model, in order to compare them to experimental results. Both experimentalists and theoreticians make heavy use of computation for understanding their data, in particular using visualization techniques.

It is worth making a distinction between computation as a tool and computers as a tool. Computers perform computations, but they also deal with other tasks. Scientists use computers for communicating with their peers, looking up information in Wikipedia, and for controlling lab equipment. None of these tasks involve much visible computation, though there is computation going on under the hood. Today’s computers are as much communication devices as computation devices.