The end of the scientific method: Correlation is More Valuable than Causation?

This great article in Wired discusses the impact of Petabytes of data and our newfound ability to digest it. The basic concept of the article here is that for all time before the world has been full of data that has been unavailable to us, thus, science had to operate with limited information, create theories, gather more limited information, and prove those theories.

Perhaps another approach to science is better. With our newfound ability to gather and process unimaginable amounts of data, why create models and prove them. A better method might be to think of all ways to generate data about a system under investigation, and then allow sheer computing power to find correlations. Notably, correlations on massive amounts of data bear more value than on small data sets.

I see a lot of ideas and value down a path with this style of analysis.. Very cool.