The Experimenter and the Theoretician – Linguistic Synthesis to Tell Machines What to Do

There is a traditional division of labor in scientific reseach: on the one hand we have theoretical investigations and on the other hand we have experimental examinations. This bifurcation of scientific labor can be delineated back to the ancient world and this tradition became manifest in the 17th century when modern science established mathematics as the proper tool to describe scientific theories and when observation and experiments became the framework for empirical science. During the 18th and 19th century with Newton’s physics and Laplace’s causal determinism, mathematics became the distinguished language to describe scientific theories in physics and astronomy and later in the other sciences. In the 20th century this development reached a partitioning in theoretical and experimental sciences, e.g. in physics and chemistry, and sometimes in other fields, too. Also in the applied sciences, especially in engineering, the role of mathematics started to increase in these areas, too. Along with this development several types of engineers turned up, more or less geared to mathematics or to experiments.