What Good is a Theory?

Over at Edge, they've posted a provocative article by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine: "The End of Theory -- Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete?" We are certainly entering an age where experiments create giant datasets, often so unwieldy that we literally can't keep it all -- as David Harris notes, the LHC will be storing about 15 petabytes of data per year, which sounds like a lot, until you realize that it will be creating data at a rate of 10 petabytes per second. Clearly, new strategies are called for; in particle physics, the focus is on the "trigger" that makes quick decisions about which events to keep and which to toss away, while in astronomy or biology the focus is more on sifting through the data to find unanticipated connections. Unfortunately, Anderson takes things a bit too far, arguing that the old-fashioned scientific practice ...