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This article appears to be a response to the new Journal of Computational Science whose editor-in-chief promotes computational science as separate from theory a

This article appears to be a response to the new Journal of Computational Science whose editor-in-chief promotes computational science as separate from theory and experimentation. The inciting text can be found in the description section here (click to expand the full Aims & Scope section): http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/721195/description http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home... An excerpt: "Computational Science is a rapidly growing multi- and interdisciplinary field that uses advanced computing and data analysis to understand and solve complex problems. It has reached a level of predictive capability that now firmly complements the traditional pillars of experimentation and theory." - Peter Sloot, Editor-in-Chief

_delirium 16y ago
Part of that view, at least as I understand it, was driven by a similar view from the theory side, that computational modeling isn't theory in the traditional sense. From a more academic-politics point of view, computational modeling is often a difficult sell in traditional theoretical publication venues as well, which prefer the computation to be minimal and the equations to be hand-worked--- big computational models are seen more as something that belongs to engineering. So the pushback is: fine, it's not theory, but it's still important to science, and it's clearly not experimentation, so it must be a third thing, and we'll start our own publication venues for it. I do agree more with this article that it's a kind of theory, but I think the people who disagree aren't only computational science people, but also (some) theory people.