letters to the editor
DOI: 10.1145/1859204.1859206
Science has Four Legs
As an editor of The Fourth Paradigm (http://re- search.microsoft.com/ en-us/collaboration/ fourthparadigm/default.
aspx, Microsoft Research, Redmond,
WA, 2009) and someone who subscribes to Jim Gray’s vision that there
are now four fundamental scientific
methodologies, I feel I must respond
to Moshe Y. Vardi’s Editor’s Letter
“Science Has Only Two Legs” (Sept.
2010).
First, I should explain my qualifications for defending the science-has-four-legs premise. From 1964,
beginning as a physics undergraduate
at Oxford, until 1984, when I moved
from physics to the Electronics and
Computer Science Department, I was
a working natural scientist. My Ph.D.
is in theoretical particle physics, and,
in my research career, I worked extensively with experimentalists and spent
two years at the CERN accelerator laboratory in Geneva. In computer science, my research takes in all aspects
of parallel computing—architectures,
languages, and tools, as well as methodologies for parallelizing scientific
applications—and more recently the
multi-core challenge. From 2001 to
2005, before I joined Microsoft, I was
Director of the U.K.’s eScience Core
Program, working closely with scientists of all descriptions, from astronomers and biologists to chemists
and environmental scientists. Here at
Microsoft Research, I still work with
practicing scientists.
I therefore have some relevant experience on which to ground my argument. By contrast, though Vardi has
had a distinguished career in mathematics and computer science (and
has done a great job with
Communications), he has not, as far as I know,
had much direct involvement with the
natural sciences.
It is quite clear that the two new
scientific paradigms—computational
and data-intensive—do not displace
experiment and theory, which remain
as relevant as ever. However, over the
past 50 years it is equally clear that
computational science has emerged
as a third methodology with which we
now explore problems that are sim-
ply inaccessible to experiment. To do
so, scientists need (along with their
knowledge of experiment and theo-
ry) training in numerical methods,
computer architecture, and parallel
programming. It was for this reason
that Physics Nobel Prize laureate Ken
Wilson in 1987 called computational
science the “third paradigm” for sci-
entific discovery. He was investigating
quantum chromo-dynamics, or QCD,
describing the fundamental equa-
tions between quark and gluon fields
behind the strong nuclear force. No
analytic solution is possible for solv-
ing these equations, and the only
option is to approximate the theory
on a space-time lattice. Wilson pio-
neered this technique, using super-
computers to explore the predictions
of QCD in the physical limit when the
lattice spacing tends to zero. Other
examples of such computational ex-
ploration, including galaxy formation
and climate modeling, are not test-
able through experiment in the usual
sense of the word.
author’s Response:
Hey and I are in violent agreement
that science today is thoroughly computational. What I fail to see is why
this requires it to sprout new legs. In
fact, theory in science was mathematical way before it was computational.
Does that make mathematics another
leg of science?
Experimental science always relied
on statistical analysis. Does that make
statistics another leg of science? Science today relies on highly complex
theoretical models, requiring analysis
via computation, and experimental
setups that yield massive amounts of
data, also requiring analysis via computation. So science is thoroughly
computational but still has only two
legs—theory and experiment.
moshe Y. Vardi, Editor-in-Chief
Let Patients Participate
in Their own Care
In his article “Computers in Patient Care: The Promise and the
Challenge” (Sept. 2010), Stephen V.
Cantrill, M.D., offered seven compelling arguments for integrating health
information technology (HIT) into
