Science with Petabytes

Chris Anderson makes some bold claims about the future of science. There are plenty of objections to the article voiced in the comments section, and I think Anderson is a bit too dismissive (perhaps for effect?) of the methods that have gotten us this far. However, I do believe that there are basic limits to our ability to conceptualize. Look no further than number theory and Fermat’s Last Theorem, a math problem that can be stated in a single sentence yet took hundreds of years to solve. There are problems that our brains are not equipped to handle. Can computers help? Why not!