Beginning with the headline, “Computing’s Paradigm,” The Profession of IT Viewpoint by Peter J. Denning and Peter A. Freeman (Dec. 2009) reflected some confusion with respect to Thomas Kuhn’s notion of “paradigm” (a set of social and institutional norms that regulate “normal science” over a period of time). Paradigms, said Kuhn, are incommensurable but determined by the social discourse of the environment in which science develops.

The crux of the matter seems to be that computing can’t be viewed as a branch of science since it doesn’t deal with nature but with an artifact, namely the computer. For guidance, we reflect on at least one scientific antecedentthermodynamics, which originated from the need to understand the steam engine but is distinguished from steam engineering by its search for general principles, detached from a specific machine. The Carnot cycle and entropy theorem are scientific results, not feats of engineering.