INSPIRATION

because boy do I need it.

From The Economist: Computing the future

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…

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.

There is no doubt that computing has become increasingly important to science over the years. The volume of data produced doubles every year, according to Alexander Szalay, another astrophysicist, who works at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Particle-physics experiments are particularly notorious in this respect. The next big physics experiment will be the Large Hadron Collider currently being built at CERN, a particle-physics laboratory in Geneva. It is expected to produce 800m collisions a second when it starts operations next year. This will result in a data flow of 1 gigabyte per second, enough to fill a DVD every five seconds. All this information must be transmitted from CERN to laboratories around the world for analysis. The computer science being put in place to deal with this and similar phenomena forms the technological aspect of the predicted scientific revolution.

Such solutions, however, are merely an extension of the existing paradigm of collecting and ordering data by whatever technological means are available, but leaving the value-added stuff of interpretation to the human brain. What really interested Dr Emmott’s team was whether computers could participate meaningfully in this process, too. That truly would be a paradigm shift in scientific method.

Dont I know it.

By the way, the report (PDF) is pretty interesting, as is this week’s issue of Nature, which covers aspects of the report in some detail. The report on the history of scientific computing is especially interesting.

(big ups to Shaafalupagus for passing me this link)