Now they are aware that you can't really do biology without it. Now they commonly speak of doing them in silica as simulations run on the silicon chips of a computer. There are computational chemistry, computational neuroscience, computational genetics, computational immunology and computational molecular biology. Even fields like sociology and anthropology are slowly succumbing to the change. At the Santa Fe Institute, computer models are used to study the factors that might have led to the rise and fall of complex cultures like the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde a kind of artificial archaeology.
Scientists still devise hypotheses to be tested in the laboratory or in the field.
A network of nerve cells or a complex molecule comes to life as an animation on a phosphorescent screen to be electronically prodded and poked, manipulated with a fluidity not possible in the real world. In the course of this augmentation of the scientific mind, the volume of data that needs to be analyzed has increased from a trickle to a torrent, with physicists and biologists making the heaviest demands. Early last month, Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., unveiled precise new measurements of something called the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. For months scientists gathered information about how streams of these particles, ejected from an accelerator, wobbled as they coursed around inside the world's largest superconducting magnet a donut-shaped ring more than 40 feet in diameter. Details aside, the take-home message of the experiment was that the revered Standard Model, a longstanding theory describing the particles and forces of the universe, may be tantalizingly wrong.