“Anything which uses science as part of its name isn't: political science, creation science, computer science.”
Source: The Nature of Belief http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/sept97/0213.html
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Hal Abelson 11
computer scientist 1947Related quotes

Bauer (1971) "Software Engineering." Information Processing: Proceedings of the IFIP Congress 1971, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, August 23-28, 1971.

“At its birth eugenics was not a politicised science; it was a science-ised political creed.”
Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 21 “Eugenics” (p. 288)

Revue Scientifique (1871)
Variant translation: There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

Dijkstra (1986) On a cultural gap http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD924.html (EWD 924).
1980s
Context: A confusion of even longer standing came from the fact that the unprepared included the electronic engineers that were supposed to design, build and maintain the machines. The job was actually beyond the electronic technology of the day, and, as a result, the question of how to get and keep the physical equipment more or less in working condition became in the early days the all-overriding concern. As a result, the topic became – primarily in the USA – prematurely known as ‘computer science’ – which, actually, is like referring to surgery as ‘knife science’ – and it was firmly implanted in people’s minds that computing science is about machines and their peripheral equipment. Quod non [Latin: "Which is not true"]. We now know that electronic technology has no more to contribute to computing than the physical equipment. We now know that programmable computer is no more and no less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism without changing a single wire, and that the core challenge for computing science is hence a conceptual one, viz., what (abstract) mechanisms we can conceive without getting lost in the complexities of our own making.

“Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.”
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 98
Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxviii; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).
The roots of scientific integrity, Editorial in Science (29 March 1963) 139: 1257 [DOI: 10.1126/science.139.3561.1257]