Sep 7, 2016

Seeing the Forest

A frosty web, courtesy of a spider in my back yard. Image: Yin Liu.

The year 2014 was the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web. There has been, understandably, a great deal of reflection on the significance of this invention, which is generally accepted to have come into existence when Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer at CERN, the physics research facility in Switzerland, proposed a hypertext solution for information management there. The original proposal is available on the Web, and it’s quite readable: ‘Vague but exciting,’ in the words of Mike Sendall. I’d like my grant adjudicators to say that about my research.