Download The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date AudioBook Free
New insights from the knowledge of science.... Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor suggested to dangerous. We used to think the Earth was the guts of the universe which Pluto was a world. For many years, we were persuaded that the brontosaurus was a genuine dinosaur. In a nutshell, what we know about the globe is constantly changing. Nonetheless it turns out there's an order to the talk about of knowledge, an explanation for how exactly we know what we know. Samuel Arbesman can be an expert in neuro-scientific scientometrics - basically the knowledge of knowledge. Knowledge in most areas evolves systematically and predictably, and this advancement unfolds in a remarkable way that can have a robust impact on our lives. Doctors with a harsh idea of when their knowledge is likely to expire can be better outfitted to keep up with the latest research. Companies and governments that understand how long new discoveries take to develop can improve decisions about allocating resources. And by tracing how so when language changes, each of us can better bridge generational gaps in slang and dialect. Just as we know a chunk of uranium can break down in a measurable timeframe - a radioactive half-life - so too any given field's change in knowledge can be measured concretely. We are able to know when facts in aggregate are obsolete, the rate at which new fact is created, and even how facts multiply. Arbesman can take us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a couple of years, or higher the course of generations. He shows that a lot of what we know consists of "mesofacts" - facts that change at a middle timescale, often over a single human lifetime. Throughout, he offers interesting examples about the face of knowledge: what British majors can study from a statistical analysis of The Canterbury Tales, why it's so difficult to assess a mountain, and why so many parents still notify kids to eat their spinach because it's rich in flat iron. The Half-life of Facts is a riveting journey into the counterintuitive cloth of knowledge. It can help us find new ways to measure the world while agreeing to the boundaries of how much we can know with certainty.
