16 April 2009 - computer science

They say that physics is the parent company of which all others are subsidiaries, but isn’t it really computer science? After all, computer science has “science” in its name, so you know it’s not just some engineering discipline. And physics doesn’t. To see why, let’s consider traffic cones—no, those are too simple. Let’s consider electrons. Every electron is a tiny quantum computer that computes how to be an electron under specific conditions. If you want to understand electrons, the only problem is that all these computers don’t tell you what they’re doing. Physics is the engineering discipline of creating I/O devices for naturally-occurring computers.