The Muslim Times’ Editor’s comment: We have modified the original title.
What would big data think of Einstein?
Source: BBC
By Sydney Finkelstein: Professor of strategy and leadership, and Dean for Executive Education, at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth
Albert Einstein, author of the theory of relativity, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. Would his genius make it past the big data test today?
A friend of mine recently remarked on the uncanny ability of Netflix to recommend movies that he almost always finds interesting. Amazon, too, barrages email inboxes with book recommendations, among other things. Indeed, the entire advertising industry has been transformed by its ability to use data to target individual consumers in ways unimaginable in the Mad Men era.
But big data should not be confused with big ideas. It is in those ideas — the ones that make us conjure up the image of Albert Einstein — that lead to breakthroughs.
The benefits of big data are so, well, big, that there’s no going back. Yet I don’t need to re-read George Orwell, or scan the latest headlines about the massive snooping of personal communications orchestrated by the National Security Agency in the United States to feel at least some discomfort with big data’s side effects. One that seldom gets notice: in a world where massive datasets can be analysed to identify patterns not easily identified using simpler analogue methods, what happens to genius of the Einstein variety?
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Companies, like civilisations, advance by leaps and bounds when genius is let loose, not when genius is locked away and deemed too out of the mainstream of data-driven knowledge.
What if Albert Einstein lived today and not 100 years ago? What would big data say about the general theory of relativity, about quantum theory? There was no empirical support for his ideas at the time — that’s why we call them breakthroughs.
Today, Einstein might be looked at as a curiosity, an “interesting” man whose ideas were so out of the mainstream that a blogger would barely pay attention. Come back when you’ve got some data to support your point.
The Muslim Times’ Editor’s comment: You may or may not have the Bid Data or the Big Idea, but others will provide those for you.
What each one of us needs the most, to lead a successful life, are the Big Principles, the eternal and everlasting principles, for successful living, as described in the Holy Quran.
May be you already know these principles, or keep reading the Muslim Times and over time you will discover them for yourself.
This is not to undermine the Big Data or the Big Idea but only to stress the Big Principles!
The Holy Quran states:
Do they seek a religion other than Allah’s, while to Him submits whosoever is in the heavens and the earth, willingly or unwillingly, and to Him shall they be returned? (Al Quran 3:84)
Categories: Americas, Science and Technology