Tim wrote:To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Tuesday, November 19, 2002 4:50 AM SNIP >... > I just don't see any such sign of a revolution. No more so than 10 > years ago, 20 years ago. Yes, computers are now more powerful. >Problems > tend to grow faster in size than computers do, however, and often > having 100x the power only yields a slight improvement in accuracy, not > qualitative leaps or breakthroughs. (Paralleling, no pun intended, the > spacing of the Mersenne primes, where it's taking longer and longer to > brute force find the next one, even with dramatically more computer > power. Or the accelerator energy gap, where 10 times the accelerator > energy doesn't produce much more new physics.) > > There are aspects of computers that are always touching on cultural > issues.
This last sentence tries to rectify your narrow view of a "revolution", understood not so much restricted in the quarters of Physics and other 'sciences' but in the entire life of humanity: The information-spread all over and in all topics. Todays use of computers is not computer-stuff: it is human lifestyle. Revolutionarily different from the lifestyle of 30 years ago. The "industrial revolution" was not an improved weaving machine. Revolutions are not results of a factual change, not changing a specific (scientific?) topical technique, they are trends, developing slowly within human development and observable only after a period as instrumental alterations in the facets of the entire life. And this is, what computers *helped* to occur, not by their technological gadgetal or theoretical improvements, but the universality of the world-information exchange - unparallelled earlier. Internet and stuff. The appreciable survey of newer segmental ideas and topical bestsellers you provide pertains to the technicalities and periferals of this revolution. There is a bigger (wider) one going on than your search for as a 'real' "scientific revolution", which is a segmental development anyway. > My belief is that basic mathematics is much more important than > computer use, in terms of understanding the cosmos and the nature of > reality. That may be an opinion and I respect it without subscribing to it. > > --Tim May Respectfully John Mikes