2017-06-04 - Computers were Created by Us

The problem with a lot of scientific disciplines is that they are trying to understand and rationalize the universe and the universe has very little interest in being understood. Every time we think we have it figured out something new comes up and turns everything upside down. Isaac Newton figured he had a good handle on the whole gravity thing. He said it was the attraction between objects with mass. That worked rather well to explain the orbits of the planets. Albert Einstein thought about it and decided that didn't quite work. He figured gravity was actually just an imaginary force caused by the curving of space-time due to massive objects. Now physicists are working to come up with a quantized model of gravity which fits into our current understanding of quantum mechanics. The more we learn about the universe the more complicated our models become.

Computer science on the other hand is about understanding things we ourselves have built. Computers are as simple as we want them to be because we built them to be that way. There's also really handy manuals and diagrams to explain how things work. If worse comes to worse and you still don't understand something there's a chance you can track down the person who's responsible for it and ask them why.

The benefit of this difference is that computer science is a lot more accessible than other fields. We are in control of every concept and idea which exists in computer science. We decide how things work. Now that's not to say computer scientists can't be weird and come up with weird concepts. It's just that there's usually an easier to find explanation. Instead of questions like "Why can particles jump through walls?" we have questions like "Why are the keys on a keyboard arranged the way they are?" which are a lot easier to answer.

This is one of the reasons I find working with computers to be appealing. I know that whatever I am trying to figure out it made sense to someone. If they can understand it enough to build it then I can understand it well enough to use it.