<p>(1) Computer scientists are not scientists, and are just engineers with fancy names. Agree or not?</p>
<p>(2) Physicists are more contributive and important than computer scientists because physicists map the universe while computer scientists only study things about computers. Agree or not?</p>
<p>If you dont agree with (1) and (2), please explain why.</p>
<p>Thank You For Your Opinions!</p>
<p>I personally don’t agree with either.</p>
<p>1) Engineers still do research and have expertise in scientific fields (I would hope that a bio-engineer would have expertise in biology), and so qualify as scientists to me at any rate. For that matter, there’s a difference between computer engineering and computer science to begin with (as they are often separate majors), so I would assume one is not the other, despite any overlaps.</p>
<p>2) I definitely don’t agree with this. Saying one field is more important or than another is asinine, especially when the two fields are so important and interrelated. What did you use to type the post? Hopefully a computer or similar device. Which field is responsible for designing that device? Probably computer science/engineering. In the modern era, computers and computing technology are so vastly important that you could just as easily make the claim that computer science is the most important field by far (not that I ever would). Besides that, physicists now use computers to do most of their research; imagine trying to study anything at CERN without a computer =P But much of the knowledge about circuitry, electricity, and magnetism, was determined by physicists, and was applied to the real-world by electrical engineers and computer scientists/engineers. They are so interrelated that you really can’t say one in more important than another, and this is true for most fields, especially in the sciences.</p>
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<p>Personally, I think the sanitation workers who remove my garbage every Wednesday are more important than either.</p>
<p>What, is this a homework assignment?</p>
<p>My pure math son says that physicists are merely applied mathematicians with pretensions of grandeur…but he is a self confessed math snob who says that calculus is for monkeys…haha. </p>
<p>Of course computer scientists and engineers will all have well paying jobs while he will have to learn to say “would you want fries with that” to support himself on a post doc’s and assistant professor’s salary writing books that will sell in the hundreds.</p>
<p>^Illustrated in pictures:</p>
<p>[xkcd:</a> Purity](<a href=“http://xkcd.com/435/]xkcd:”>xkcd: Purity)</p>
<p>^ TY-- I sent it my son who is passing it around the gang in Math 55! He thought it was priceless.</p>
<p>Purity does not mean superiority. Physicists are on top on that scale.</p>
<p>Pay no attention to my name =o</p>
<p>no offense, but…what the hell are these questions? the question of what is “better” or "more important"in fact, the very use of those vague, superficial conceptsjust reflects a degree of legalism and pedantic triviality that doesn’t belong in ANY deep study of ANY science. also, if you knew anything about modern information theory and the advances being made in quantum computing and related fields, the physical universe itself can be very well studied as a computer (a quantum computer, more precisely. read some of seth lloyd’s work over at MIT). “only study things about computers” just reveals a narrow mindset that doesn’t understand what a computer actually ISnothing more and nothing less than a system that processes information, which can, again, extend to physical phenomena and the universe itself. in the end, all of our dumb categorizations of “biology” vs. “chemistry” vs. “physics” vs. “computer science” are just irrelevant labels because our finite, flawed minds can’t live without labels. a true scientist realizes that the study of the natural world is interdisciplinary. and why the uppity tone against engineers? they create. scientists don’t. i’m not arguing that either party is “superior”, but if you live in and take advantage of the modern digital era, you have no right to look down on engineers. theoretical computer science can, in fact, be incredibly abstract and pure and actually not manifest in engineering applications at all…ultimately computer science is the study of information, which can pop in both the natural sciences (e.g. the rapid explosion in computational biology in the past decade) and in engineering.</p>
<p>in short, i completely disagree with the mindset those questions were born out of. sorry for the rant 
lol</p>
<p>I disagree because of the medium through which you made your supposition.</p>
<p>actually i don’t know of any pure math person who considers him (mostly)self a scientist. they feel closer to philosophers and maybe artists-- my S always talks about proofs as things of beauty that have no value beyond their beauty. He would show me something he had done and say “isn’t it beautiful??” and the one rival growing up was a boy who could solve the same problems as he could-- but S would say-- “but he just powers over them–there is no elegance” it wasn’t that the boy was as good as he, (he knows others who are as good, and much better, that he admires) but that this boy never “got it”-- it wasn’t the solving that mattered it was doing so with style and grace–and, yes, wit. It came as no surprise to S that when that boy went to university he changed to applied math.</p>
<p>I have never heard, him, his friends or any math profs ever speak about their work’s illuminating the verities of universe–except in the most abstract, poetic sense. it’s funny that people ask me if when he was a young kid did he ask tons of questions the way young scientists do–you know “why is the sky blue?” – no, i never remember a single one–instead he just made up the most amazingly complex stories that grew deeper and more profound as the years grew on. </p>
<p>No surprise that he is also a classical composer (as is the chair of the Harvard math department , Noam Elkies) and he has said they there is no difference in kind, just in style, between writing music and writing math. that is why he finds no kinship with physicists, or computer people, or engineers-- they are interested in completely different questions and their minds work in very different ways. Not better, but very very different.</p>