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"When you improve the praxis of science, the dream is that you’ll improve its products, too. Leibniz’s notation, by making it easier to do calculus, expanded the space of what it was possible to think. The grand scientific challenges of our day are as often as not computational puzzles: How to integrate billions of base pairs of genomic data, and 10 times that amount of proteomic data, and historical patient data, and the results of pharmacological screens into a coherent account of how somebody got sick and what to do to make them better? How to make actionable an endless stream of new temperature and precipitation data, and oceanographic and volcanic and seismic data? How to build, and make sense of, a neuron-by-neuron map of a thinking brain? Equipping scientists with computational notebooks, or some evolved form of them, might bring their minds to a level with problems now out of reach."

Labels: #Pragmatics, #Science