Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!crdgw1!montnaro From: montnaro@spyder.crd.ge.com (Skip Montanaro) Newsgroups: comp.graphics Subject: Re: Scientific visualization, philosophic question Message-ID: Date: 15 Jun 90 13:16:56 GMT References: <6719@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com Reply-To: montanaro@crdgw1.ge.com (Skip Montanaro) Organization: GE Corporate Research & Development, Schenectady, NY Lines: 41 In-reply-to: eugene@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov's message of 14 Jun 90 20:14:36 GMT In article <6719@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> eugene@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) writes: If one would have sent a modern graphics workstation (with documentation and full color), back in time to 1952, would there have been signficantly different change (new discovery, etc.) in the way Watson and Crick would have uncovered the structure of DNA? Would they have gained further insight? No modern biosoftware, of course. .... Note 2: W&C spent a lot of time manipulating ball and stick models. Would they have gained the insight from a 2-D screen as they did with their 3-D models? .... Would Watson and Crick have learned more, faster using a workstation than their simple ball and stick models? Why? How? If you consider the structure of DNA (using hindsight, of course), its fundamental building blocks (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine? my biochemistry is real rusty) are not all that complex, there are a limited number of stable ways to put them together, and they are few in number. Watson & Crick (and Pauling, for that matter - he was perhaps blinded by his earlier work on protein structure) knew what they were; they had to figure out which way matched the x-ray crystallography results. I doubt a modern graphics workstation sans Biograph would have been very helpful. On the other hand, consider the flow of gases through a jet engine, the ultrasonic energy profile over the surface of a part being machined, or the temperature profile over an airfoil. I submit that the "building blocks" of those problems (however you care to define them) are somehow much more complicated than those of DNA. In cases like that there's no substitute for the computer`s ability to quickly create a picture that has a strong tie to physical reality. Put another way, there are no simple ball-and-stick models for many of the problems being tackled by so-called scientific visualizers. -- Skip (montanaro@crdgw1.ge.com)