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Doing Physics with Computers
Eric Mazur
Academic Computing, February, 18-21, 46-48 (1988). export citation
Are the days of watching analog meters, taking notes in thick lab
books and plotting data points on graph paper gone forever? Is
research in the physical sciences becoming so complex that one
can no longer do research without computers? A superficial survey
of the current research in physics might lead one to give an
affirmative answer to these questions. It is therefore interesting to
note that the award of this year's Nobel Prize in physics to Alex
Müller and Georg Bednorz for their work on superconductivity was
hailed as a victory for relatively simple, small-scale research. No
computer was needed to show that their compound of copper,
oxygen, lanthanum and barium becomes superconducting. It
shows that one can still make major breakthroughs with very
simple means-without computers. Computers excel at performing
tedious routine tasks. Physics research on the other hand seldom
entails routine work. This holds true in particular in theoretical
physics: indeed, no computer has yet been able to develop a new
theory. Yet one cannot deny that the presence of computers in
physics research and education increases every day. Physics
papers on results that have been obtained with the help of
computers abound, and some fields of physics would not even
exist without computers. As a physicist, I will try to analyze in this
article the impact of computers on physics. I will start by analyzing
the current situation using examples from my own laboratory.
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