Anecdote about my first professor of Computer Science,
in Graduate School at U. Penn, Averind Joshi:
I went to him and said : I wrote up some programs in Algol
to execute the Turing Machines in the exercises.
He said, standing on his toes, "In the FIRST place, in the
PHYSICAL universe, there is not, nor could there ever be, such
a thing as a Turing Machine or any
other real
computer.
If you want to deal with imprecise, unpredicatable approximations
of real computers, take some computer engineering
courses."
Of course there is NO physical science legitimately called
computer science, any more than there is a 'automotive
science'. This is what I heard Feinman say, and it surely
seems obvious. OTOH, there is a branch of *mathematics*
called computer science. I think this was Ed B's point, and
nothing that Feinmann says is even on this point, as far I can
see. The more general issue is that mathematics itself is
something entirely different from 'science;.
Wm