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Nature 440, 413-414 (23 March 2006) | doi:10.1038/440413a; Published online 22 March 2006

2020 Computing: Science in an exponential world

Alexander Szalay1 & Jim Gray2

  1. Alexander Szalay is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA.
  2. Jim Gray is at Microsoft Research, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.
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The amount of scientific data is doubling every year. Alexander Szalay and Jim Gray analyse how scientific methods are evolving from paper notebooks to huge online databases.

Scientists are trained early to keep careful records in their laboratory notebooks — recording both experimental procedures and observations, so that they can analyse their results and so that others can replicate what they have done. Galileo did it, Mendel did it, Darwin did it, and we are supposed to do it.

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