The relation between Computer Science and Engineering and Chemistry
If your curious mind wants to know that is there any relation between Computer Science and Engineering and Chemistry have or not — then this article is for you. From the topic name, you have got two different subject aspects — Chemistry and Computer Science and Engineering. If you want to relate them to each other, first you have to know the definition of Chemistry and Computer Science and Engineering.
Chemistry is a branch of science that studies the properties of matter and the changes it undergoes. Example — melting ice, boiling or freezing water (physical change), rust on iron (chemical change). Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) is an academic program that integrates the fields of computer engineering and computer science, providing knowledge of computing systems in both hardware and software design.
At first, if you go to Computer Science and Engineering, you will find a computer which is the main part of it. The computer is made of hardware and software. Software tells the hardware what to do. Hardware is the physical part of a computer. It includes the computer case, central processing unit (CPU), monitor, mouse, keyboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, speakers and motherboard. CPU is called the brain of a computer. It fetches data, processes it and gives the output. CPUs are made mostly of an element called silicon. Silicon is rather common in the earth’s crust and is a semiconductor. This means that depending on what materials you add to it, it can conduct when a voltage is applied to it. It is the ‘switch that makes a CPU work. Silicon is a chemical element with the symbol “ Si ”and atomic number 14. It is a hard, brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic luster, and is a tetravalent metalloid and semiconductor. A motherboard is composed of layers that have copper embedded in between fiberglass. Copper is a chemical element with the symbol “ Cu ” and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity.
In a computer, there are two types of memory — primary memory and secondary memory. Memory is part of a computer where the information is stored. The more programs your system is running, the more memory you’ll likely need. In a way, memory is like your desk. RAM and ROM are the primary memory. RAM (Random Access Memory) consists of flip-flops, a bi-stable circuit composed of four to six transistors. Transistors are made of semiconductor chemical elements, usually silicon, which belongs to the modern Group 14 (formerly Group IV) in the periodic table of elements. Germanium, another group-14 element, is used together with silicon in specialized transistors. ROM (Read Only Memory) has the capability to store the information permanently. ROM is made up of decoder and OR gates within a single IC package. Most gates are made from MOSFETs (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors). Compound logic gates AND-OR-Invert (AOI) and OR-AND-Invert (OAI) are often employed in circuit design because their construction using MOSFETs is simpler and more efficient than the sum of the individual gates.
Now if you go to chemistry, you can see that chemists not only busy with their glass beakers, they use Computers for operating their instruments also. They plot their results, write their research articles using various computer software. Computational chemistry is a branch of chemistry that uses computer simulation to assist in solving chemical problems. It uses methods of theoretical chemistry, incorporated into efficient computer programs, to calculate the structures and properties of molecules and solids. It is vast and it can be used to study all forms of matter, namely, solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.
For example, pharmaceutical industries use Computational Chemistry (CC) to screen many compounds to find the best possible drug molecules to bind a particular protein pocket or they screen several polymorphs of a particular drug molecule to find the most stable polymorphs at room temperature. These screening procedures help the industries to decrease the cost of producing a drug by many folds at which they can sell the drug as the final tests with real experiments now only need to be performed with a very few set of compounds. With the recent drastic improvements in artificial intelligence, there is a huge surge in the utilization of CC in the pharmaceutical industry. By combining artificial intelligence with CC, millions of drug molecules are being screened to find potential candidates for medicinal use.
So, with the above discussion, it can be said that there is a core relation between Chemistry and Computer Science and Engineering. You can’t think Computer Science and Engineering without Chemistry and likewise for Chemistry.
References:
• Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/)
• Amrita Education News (https://www.amrita.edu/news/chemistry-inside-computer)
