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Data Deluge in the Petabyte Age
by Andrew McCaskey
The new Wired series (which I assume is the theme for the new issue of Wired Magazine, which I have not yet seen) is on the new world of the Petabyte – and how such barely imaginable volumes of data could become commonplace.
Two years ago I was trying to explain the enormity of a Terabyte of storage to my wife. Now, for a few hundred dollars, that is available in a single drive at the local Best Buy or Walmart.
The most disturbing article that is in the Wired series concerns the notion that the deluge of data will make the Scientific Method obsolete – that theories or models will no longer be necessary and that direct, empirical or behaviorial information is all that will be required to simulate or predict reality.
Wrong. And wrong for the reason that it leads us to believe that what we observe is correct. The one thing about the scientific method, of theory, of models, is that they are provisional. A set of facts are observed, and the process repeated by others resulting in the same observations. The theory or model is constructed, and is good enough -until the next set of reproducible observations that don’t quite match the predicted values. Then a change to the theory, an improvement of the model- or a wholesale new viewpoint that matches the observations’ predictive power.
Petabytes of data are not going to remove the need for scientific method and observation – in fact, it will make it even more necessary.
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