Computer scientist Lance Fortnow writes that by embracing the computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our seemingly random world.
In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career:
Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn’t “can you read music?” It’s “can you hear it?” Can you hear the music, Robert?
Oppenheimer: Yes, I can.
I can’t hear the algebra, but I feel the machine.
I felt the machine even before I touched a computer. In the 1970s I awaited the arrival of my first one, a Radio Shack TRS-80, imagining how it would function. I wrote some simple programs on paper and could feel the machine I didn’t yet have processing each step. It was almost a disappointment to finally type in the program and just get the output without experiencing the process going on inside.
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