The Computational Systems of the World
David C. Krakauer · BioScience · 2014
In 1832, the astronomer, mathematician, and chemist Sir John Herschel commented with approval on the significant contributions that mathematical models had made in the physical sciences: “We no longer perceive the same shyness, on the part of our mathematical champions, in entering on the great and vexed questions of the lunar and planetary perturbations, the theory of the tides, and others relating to the system of the world” (Herschel 1832, p. 38). Herschel was reflecting on mathematical physics, which had produced “a wonderful result, that a brief and simple sentence,… accompanied with a few determinate numbers, capable of being written down on half a sheet of paper, comprehends within its meaning the history of all the complicated movements of our globe, and the mighty system to which it belongs” (Herschel 1832, p. 21). A high degree of coherence between observation and theory had long been sought by natural philosophers to better organize and unify a diverse and complicated reality. This ambition is elegantly captured by one of Charles Darwin's heroes, the philosopher of science William Whewell, in the theory of the scientific method of 1858 (the Novum Organon Renovatum): “The system becomes more coherent as it is further extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of facts are already contained in our system. In false theories, the contrary is the case.… Such a false theory was the ancient doctrine of eccentrics and epicycles” (Butts 1968, p. 155).