Goodbye Mr. Newton
"The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More -- More is Different" in the July 16 edition of Wired takes a fascinating look at how our ability to process enormous amounts of data has forever changed science as well as business, medicine and technology. Separate articles probe how mass data collection and analysis have fundamentally altered the study of astronomy, biology, diseases, agriculture, physics, politics and much more. The lead essay, "The End of Theory," by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson argues that computers' capacity to instantly sift through a library's worth of data has made obsolete the methods — hypothesize, model, test — used by generations of scientists from Newton to Einstein:
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.
"The Petabyte Age" is a great example of big-picture journalism that takes seemingly unrelated phenomena and shows how they fit together. www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_intro
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