Astronomers predict that Halley’s Comet will next make its closest approach to the earth on July 28, 2061. By that time, many problems in the natural world that now vex our predictive abilities will have come within the range of our knowledge. Nature’s laws do not change very much. So long as the store of human knowledge continues to expand, as it has since Gutenberg’s printing press, we will slowly come to a better understanding of nature’s signals, if never all its secrets. And yet if science and technology are the heroes of this book, there is the risk in the age of Big Data about becoming
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