Computational Thinking in Science
Peter J. Denning · Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018
A quiet but profound revolution has been taking place throughout science. The computing revolution has transformed science by enabling all sorts of new discoveries through information technology. Throughout most of the history of science and technology, there have been two types of characters. One is the experimenter, who gathers data to reveal when a hypothesis works and when it does not. The other is the theoretician, who designs mathematical models to explain what is already known and uses the models to make predictions about what is not known. The two types interact with one another because hypotheses may come from models, and what is known comes from previous models and data. The experimenter and the theoretician were active in the sciences well before computers came on the scene. Computational thinking is generally defined as the mental skills that facilitate the design of automated processes.