A computational paradigm of science and its discontents

A number of theoretical and technical innovations in the 1930s and 1940s led to a new era of computing, and computing started to develop as an independent academic discipline. Some pioneers of computing emphasized the theoretical elements of science, advocating a mathematical view of computing as a discipline. Others distanced computing from natural sciences and championed for academic legitimacy of sciences of the artificial. At the time when experimental computer science debates emerged, many meta-studies compared research in computing with natural sciences and engineering, condemning computing as methodologically deficient. But in the new century, the success of computing in many scientific applications made computing, in the minds of many, a "paradigm" for other sciences: Computing can learn from nature, or it might be the best tool for studying natural phenomena, or it might actually be what nature does. This talk describes the journey of computing from a nascent young field struggling for legitimacy to the views that computing might not be only "a" science but "the" science.