Technology is simply more relevant than footnotes. There are other reasons why technology has seized control of the culture. These questions, of course, are the same ones that natural philosophers and scientists of the first two cultures have been asking for centuries. Nerds get new answers to these ancient and compelling questions not by rehashing Plato or by carefully setting up controlled experiments but by trying to create an artificial reality, an artificial life, an artificial consciousness-and then plunging themselves into it. Despite the cartoon rendition I've just sketched, the nerd way is a third way of doing science.
Classical science is a conversation between theory and experiment.
Technological novelties such as computer models are neither here nor there. It's easy to see why such technological worlds are regarded with such wariness by science-they seem corrupted coming and going. But in fact, these models yield a third kind of truth, an experiential synthesis-a parallel existence, so to speak. A few years ago when Tom Ray, a biologist turned nerd, created a digital habitat in a small computer and then loosed simple digital organisms in it to procreate, mutate, and evolve, he was no longer merely modelling evolution or collecting data. Instead, Ray had created a wholly new and novel example of real evolution.