Today, scientists live and breathe computers. To them, computers are the equivalent of weight-training rooms for football players. They could do their jobs without them, but then they'd get squashed into the turf by the competition. Computers do a lot of things for scientists, says Randy Isaac, vice president at IBM's Watson Research Labs. Some of it is mundane.
Spreadsheets do basic arithmetic in a split second.
Equations can be manipulated, run and checked with ease. Experimentalists can much more quickly gather and analyze data to tell the theorists sooner than ever that none of their theories are right and they better get back to the drawing boards. Those are basically time savers and error eliminators. A step deeper is simulation. One Maryland lab now has a complete, 3-D simulation of the Chesapeake Bay running on a supercomputer, allowing it to test theories about how the ecosystem works and see the results as if they were real.