Almeisan said:
Well, only if you are religious. Or, if your definition of a computer is limited by our current technology. Surely our brains are nothing like our computers, as of yet. Surely our brains are made of stuff, and therefore machines, not magic.
The brain may not be "magic", but it certainly isn't a simple machine either, because saying that is selling the brain short and ignoring what humans can currently do that is beyond what is imaginable for a computer to do. Remember, we have had an extremely longer period of evolution in our existence than these computers.
The thing about this whole issue is that it has a simplified idea of what a scientist does, and how he/she makes progress. A scientist simply does not just do rote, repetitive, "known" work all the time. The job requires quite a bit of creativity and cunning, because one often deals with something new and unsolved. There is a huge element of "insight" that simply can't be taught. Two scientists in the same field will look at the same problem, and each one of them can easily come up with different approaches to tackle that problem. There is a large element of unpredictability here that has been ignored.
I've mentioned this before, but one of my PRL publication was a result of a 10-minute discussion during a coffee break at a workshop! We were discussing what we heard during the last session, and right there and then, the 3 of us came up with a neat experiment to see if it could be done. So here, there are two things at work already that I do not see how a computer would be able to do: (i) the interaction of people with differing ideas and contribution and (ii) the creative thinking of forming a new and never-done-before experiment to test something.
There is another aspect of doing science here that has been ignored: serendipity! Anyone who has done research-front science can attest to the fact that there is an element of "Who Ordered That?" whenever we do science, especially experimental science. It requires insight and creativity to not only appreciate such discovery, but also to know what to look for and how to verify that it is real.
The one thing that most people forget is that there is a difference between science itself, and being a scientist. I've always said that while it may be possible for one to learn about a particular subject simply by learning from books, papers, lectures, etc., one doesn't become a scientist that way. Being a scientist involved many aspect of social and cultural activities, not least of which is pleading the importance of your case, especially to funding agencies. Because of this, a scientist needs to know the difference between what is important, versus what is interesting. Those two are not always mutually inclusive! Something may be "interesting" because it is an unsolved problem. A computer may be able to detect that it is an unsolved problem. But how would a computer know that it is "important"?
Something is "important" based on external criteria that can't be programmed or predicted easily, and it changes with the times. Research in THz radiation is very important right now because there is a demand for it, especially in terms of homeland security. But this is entirely the result of political, social pressures, not anything inherent in the physics that one can pick up.
No, a computer can replace "number crunchers", but it cannot replace the person.
But speaking of "number crunchers", even this is already highly limited. Case in point: no computer program or codes today can derive the phenomenon of superconductivity, starting at the single-particle interaction. In other words, start with one electron in a solid, and add more and more electrons, etc... until one arrives at the BCS ground state. It hasn't been done and so far, it can't be done. The computing power to get to that is unfathomable. One can use the same argument for many emergent phenomena that we currently have, where the starting point here is not at the single-partice interaction, but at the many-body interaction picture. So already, even with just pure number crunching brute force, something we thought that computers should be very good at, we see an obvious limitation to its capability already! This is a data point, an evidence, that shouldn't be ignored when people tout the capabilities of computers.
Zz.
