To Know, but Not Understand

Why Big Data will rule us all:

Models this complex — whether of cellular biology, the weather, the economy, even highway traffic — often fail us, because the world is more complex than our models can capture. But sometimes they can predict accurately how the system will behave. At their most complex these are sciences of emergence and complexity, studying properties of systems that cannot be seen by looking only at the parts, and cannot be well predicted except by looking at what happens.

This marks quite a turn in science’s path. For Sir Francis Bacon 400 years ago, for Darwin 150 years ago, for Bernard Forscher 50 years ago, the aim of science was to construct theories that are both supported by and explain the facts. Facts are about particular things, whereas knowledge (it was thought) should be of universals. Every advance of knowledge of universals brought us closer to fulfilling the destiny our Creator set for us.

This strategy also had a practical side, of course. There are many fewer universals than particulars, and you can often figure out the particulars if you know the universals: If you know the universal theorems that explain the orbits of planets, you can figure out where Mars will be in the sky on any particular day on Earth. Aiming at universals is a simplifying tactic within our broader traditional strategy for dealing with a world that is too big to know by reducing knowledge to what our brains and our technology enable us to deal with.