Science in an exponential world

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.