The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.
When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web... Now even my cat has its own page.
The story of the Web starts in 1980, when Berners-Lee, a young consulting physicist at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, grew frustrated with existing methods for finding and transferring information.
The web's strength lies precisely in its unique position as the world's first universal platform.
This is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny little world. Step inside of the tiny little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly, all these tiny little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world.
When it broke out in the mid 1990s, the web was society's first at-scale digital artifact. It spread in orders of ten, first thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions of pages - and on it went, to the billions it now encompasses.
Einstein's theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum - for small things.
We speak of 'software eating the world,' 'the Internet of Things,' and we massify 'data' by declaring it 'Big.' But these concepts remain for the most part abstract. It's hard for many of us to grasp the impact of digital technology on the 'real world' of things like rocks, homes, cars, and trees. We lack a metaphor that hits home.
Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.
The Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.
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