You may have heard that Big Data is all the rage these days. Big Data this, Big Data that. Let’s acquire as much information as possible and try to wrestle with it to gain insights into everything from stock market performance to consumer preferences to health outcomes.

And it’s great, I have no problem at all with Big Data. Many of the sciences have been playing the Big Data game for a long time, long before it became fashionable in silicon valley. In particular, physicists and astronomers have been grappling with large datasets for decades, as starlight pours into telescopes and particle explosions pour through colliders. They’ve developed a lot of sophisticated techniques for filtering through data, finding correlations and trying to make sense of what nature is whispering to us.

Source: forbes.com
Author: Paul M. Sutter