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Page 2 of 9 Cerri. Chem Synth 2023;3:18 https://dx.doi.org/10.20517/cs.2022.37

properties, functions) of natural phenomena, to understand them and to forecast their evolutions as much
as possible. Each of the traditional disciplines (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) answers questions about one
of the components/properties of natural phenomena. The primary concern of physics is energy; for
chemistry, the goal is to understand matter; and for biology, it is to understand life.

In ancient times, these areas were regarded as part of philosophy. Aristoteles, for example, wrote about
physics (περí φúσεως means about nature), with philosophy considered to be a general reflection on nature.
These disciplines were originally part of philosophy and emerged as distinctive subjects; furthermore, each
continues to split with increasing speed and acceleration today. For example, we may now speak about
nanotechnologies as a technical offshoot of modern physics and chemistry or genetics as an offshoot of
contemporary biology.

Disciplines also fuse with one another: biochemistry and bioinformatics are examples. Their interactions are
increasingly perceived, measured, and controlled, so no scientist wishing to be taken seriously may admit to
ignoring these interactions if they want to be regarded as credible in understanding nature. This evolving
picture illustrates a recognition of the extreme complexity of nature itself and an acknowledgment of the
diverse and sometimes paradoxically contradictory qualities of real scientists, including ambition and
modesty. Scientists should be ambitious to explore the complexity of natural phenomena but also modest
because no single competence may comprehend the subtleties of interactions among all significant factors.
This limitation may justify a strong interest in multidisciplinary studies supported by collective intelligence
- but the reality is far from theory, as we all know.

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The emergence of sciences over many centuries was marked, in the 19 century, by significant progress in
understanding “what is energy” (physics) and “what is matter” (chemistry), and in the 20 century by
th
progress in the “what is life” (biology). Another crucial property, steering all natural phenomena (and
enabling our ability to study them), was only gradually emerging to be identified, isolated, and studied in
this later period: information.

The invention of the computer had a similar triggering effect on the construction of knowledge as had been
the case for the printing press centuries earlier. Indeed, essential computer scientists from 1940 to 1960 (e.g.,
Turing, Wiener, Shannon) paved the way for a foundational new discipline. A well-known aphorism
reminds us that computer science is not more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. In the
second half of the 20 century, informatics became recognized as the science of information, a property of
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nature of the same importance as energy, matter, and life, the four being in perpetual interaction in all
natural phenomena. Examples of extreme complexity and significance in the human body are the brain and
the immune system (see, for example, debates on the meaning of informatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Informatics). Being the computer programs (i.e., the control) stored in the same memory as data, programs
are able to treat program code as data. Therefore the invented artefact - the computer - is much more than a
machine, it is rather a meta machine, i.e.: a machine capable of learning, i.e.: able to produce totally different
machines as a function of the course of interactions with the environment. This phenomenon is very clear
and popular today, with the emergence of machine learning in deep neural nets with big data and large
language models and consequently the emergence of interactive, generative artificial intelligence systems
such as ChatGPT.

As colleagues at the University of Edinburgh (https://www.ed.ac.uk/informatics/about/what-is-informatics)
have synthesized the subject, informatics, the science of information, consists of computer science (the
components of modern computers, including robots), cognitive science (how animals, individually and