Every so often, someone (generally not a practicing scientist)
suggests that it's time to replace science with something
better. The desire often seems to be a product of either an
exaggerated sense of the potential of new approaches, or a lack
of understanding of what's actually going on in the world of
science. This week's version, which comes courtesy of Chris
Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired, manages to combine both
of these features in suggesting that the advent of a cloud of
scientific data may free us from the need to use the standard
scientific method. It's easy to see what has Anderson enthused.
Modern scientific data sets are increasingly large,
comprehensive, and electronic. Things like genome sequences tell
us all there is to know about the DNA present in an organism's
cells, while DNA chip experiments can determine every gene
that's expressed by that cell. That data's also publicly
available—out in the cloud, in the current parlance—and it's
being mined successfully. That mining extends bey