topic for study

I'm always looking at lots of problems in various areas. But in the last 10 years, the larger part of my work is on this new area, trying to understand the Internet and the Web, trying to understand the underpinnings. In computer science, we don't have great mysteries. We want to solve problems, but it's not like we have mysterious objects we don't understand. It's not like Physics, which has the Universe, or Economics, which has the Markets, Neuroscience has the Brain, and Biology the Cell. For us, the computer and its software are huge, complex, powerful, and fascinating, but we constructed them. Intrinsically, there's very little mystery.


In many ways, the Internet and the Web, we did not create them. They arrived, appeared, emerged. All these other artifacts, software, processors, and so forth, there was a designer, a team, an entity that intentionally built them. The Web emerged from an interaction of millions of entities on the basis of deliberately simple protocols. Thus the Internet and the Web are our mysterious objects. Computer scientists are looking at them the way other scientists are looking at their mysterious objects. We have to look at them using the scientific method: observations, measurement, experiments, verifiable theories, applied mathematics.

- A Conversation With Christos Papadimitriou (emphasis mine)

What a way to engage the web.