>>13566120A lot of computer science is very easily understood as math (pure or applied based on the subfield of CS) and application of math to understand problems in engineering in their "purest form" (ie, instead of thinking about specific scheduling problems, they study the SAT problem, which covers a huge amount of problems that show up naturally). The science associated with computer science is usually using computational models to explain natural phenomenon. For example, we can understand a lot of anthill structure by understanding distributed computing and modelling the jobs each ant does as a simple algorithms with consensus problems attached to them. This is feasible as it's easy to show this means that ants don't need to be geniuses to build anthills, but that you get intricate, complex behavior from simple computational models.
Another big part is many body physics and computer simulation, and how a lot of problems don't have closed forms but can be understood very well by using a computer. Whether you think this is "natural" or not is up to taste, but from where I'm standing, it's like this: if it's accepted that natural sciences like physics involve heavy amounts of mathematics to understand and model nature, and these mathematics are oftentimes needed to even understand how to proceed forward both experimentally and theoretically, then there should be no reason we don't accept computational results as a part of natural science. The computational is sophisticated, involves mathematics itself, and has been invaluable in understand everything from tricky vortices to electrodynamics in IC design to things as simple as two body problems.
TL;DR if we accept math is a big part of science, regardless of what it is, we have to accept that computer science is a big part of science, regardless of what it is. It's certainly not just dicking around on computers.
