> I think a great many of astronomers were in fact "data scientists" I think the data component is a feature of applied physics in general. Physics problems ha

> I think a great many of astronomers were in fact "data scientists" I think the data component is a feature of applied physics in general. Physics problems have had a tendency to be extremely data driven, because when you're dealing with things out in the cosmos, or trying to model nuclear structure for the first time, or shed light on the Higgs mechanism, the data is all you have. You often can't see it with your eye, or a microscope. The effect you're observing only lasts a femtosecond, so you conceive of extremely fancy contraptions that measure the secondary effects en masse (if you'll allow the pun), and you end up with fantastically large data sets. That said, when I look at the scientists I knew/know, including astronomers, their solutions often take a different approach that what I see today in the "data science" blogosphere. There, the approach seems highly centered on scaling various methods to work with huge amounts of data, whereas most of scientists seem to do just the opposite. They go to great lengths--such as building massive integrating antennae the size of football fields--to make sure they collect precisely the correct data, and nothing more. They then take that data and apply the technique that they know must work, if their hypothesis is correct.