Our World, in Terabytes

Does decision-making paralyse you? A new book makes a case for careful data-crunching, another tells you to trust your intuition. Plus, a wrap-up of new books on science, including the curious relationship between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg

Super Crunchers:
How Anything Can Be Predicted
By Ian Ayres
The battlelines are being drawn ever more sharply between 8220;intuitivists8221; and what Ian Ayres, an econometrician and law professor at Yale, calls in this phenomenon of a book, the Super Crunchers. Ayres pitches high to make a point. To him, everything can be predicted 8212; from which wine vintages to invest in and how to organise inventory, to which search results will be compiled when Bill Gates as opposed to Martha Stewart google blackberry. So, what is Super Crunching? 8220;It is statistical analysis that impacts real-world decisions. Super Crunching decisions usually bring together some combination of size, speed, and scale. The sizes of the data sets are really big 8212; both in the number of observations and in the number of variables. The speed of the analysis is increasing8230; Increasingly, business and government datasets are being measured not in mega- or gigabytes but in tera- and even petabytes 1,000 terabytes.8221; By way of example: 8220;The entire US Library of Congress is about twenty terabytes of text8230; Google has about four petabytes of storage which it is constantly crunching.8221;

Ayres shows how a casino has set a client8217;s 8220;pain point8221; at 900. So when a client is nearing 900 in losses, a steward will come her way, and offer dinner or a snack on the house. If these anecdotes bring to mind Freakonomics, Ayres is quick to point out the difference. That book highlighted the connections in seemingly unrelated events that came to surface on statistical analysis. This book is about how data-crunching is impacting lives.

Gut Feelings:
The Intelligence of
The Unconscious
By Gerd Gigerenzer
Gut Feelings by Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, brings to mind Blink by Malcolm Gladwell 8212; but the case he makes is much more rooted in theory. As he explained recently in an interview: 8220;What a gut instinct is not is a calculation. You do not fully know where it comes from. My research indicates that gut feelings are based on simple rules of thumb, what we psychologists term 8216;heuristics8217;. These take advantage of certain capacities of the brain that have come down to us through time, experience and evolution. Gut instincts often rely on simple cues in the environment. In most situations, when people use their instincts, they are heeding these cues and ignoring other unnecessary information.8221; He also shows how a fielder chasing a swirling ball is best served by his instinct.

Uncertainty:
Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr,
and the Struggle for the
Soul of Science
By David Lindley
Werner Heisenberg left caught the spirit of quantum mechanics with his Uncertainty Principle, whereby one cannot know all the coordinates of a particle with absolute certainty. The 1920s were a rich time for physics, and any excuse to inquire into the lives of the men and women who founded modern physics is welcome. The uncertain relationship between Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, incidentally, still continues to intrigue historians of World War II. Heisenberg was in charge of the German atomic bomb project 8212; and mystery surrounds a conversation he had in Copenhagen with Bohr, the grand old man of modern physics. Was Heisenberg trying to snoop or was he sending a well-meaning message to his old European colleagues now migrated to America and closely involved with the Manhattan Project?

Faust in Copenhagen:
A Struggle for the Soul
of Physics
Gino Segre
The book finds its title from the annual gathering of leading physicists that Bohr would organise in Copenhagen, with one of them ending with an enactment of a parody of Faust.

The Pythagorean Theorem:
A 4,000-Year History
Eli Maor
Everyone knows the theorem: the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. Maor tries to show how the theorem appeared in ancient civilisations, before launching into a more complex mathematical analysis.

Decoding the Universe:
How the New Science of
Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos,
from Our Brains to Black Holes
Charles Seife
Isn8217;t the subtitle self-evident?