Understanding Science Through the Computational Lens

This article explores the changing nature of the interaction between computer science and the natural and social sciences. After briefly tracing the history of scientific computation, the article presents the concept of computational lens, a metaphor for a new relationship that is emerging between the world of computation and the world of the sciences. Our main thesis is that, in many scientific fields, the processes being studied can be viewed as computational in nature, in the sense that the processes perform dynamic transformations on information represented as digital data. Viewing natural or engineered systems through the lens of their computational requirements or capabilities provides new insights and ways of thinking. A number of examples are discussed in support of this thesis. The examples are from various fields, including quantum computing, statistical physics, the World Wide Web and the Internet, mathematics, and computational molecular biology.