Silicon Valley and Doing The Hard Thing

re: Erick Schonfeld’s Silicon Valley Just Ain’t What It Used To Be—And That’s a Good Thing. Silicon Valley’s pursuit of Moore’s Law continues. The Valley’s follow-on software engineering, Internet,  and mobile revolutions continue to prosper and gain value. So I’m astonished Newsweek’s Dan Lyons thinks physics is the last hard science, the last real thing, missing the newest revolution. Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga are all exercises in tackling the one thing harder than physics: People. These “silly” companies are exercises in new social sciences of human cognition, social and collective behavior, behavioral economics, trust and value networking, political value analysis, educational psychology, cultural anthropology, semantics and linguistics, industrial organization, memetics and social graphology, fraud detection, and the list goes on. I’d like to see a physicist working on nanoscale corrosion control systems improve movie recommendations (Netflix Prize) one percent or improve a game’s virality ten percent.