Samuel Arbesman Explores The Half-life Of Facts

 Scientometrics

In his book, The Half-Life of Facts, Samuel Arbesman takes his reader on a riveting journey into the counter-intuitive fabric of knowledge. Packed with interesting tidbits…the book explains how facts spread and change over time.

Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades, we were convinced that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing.

But it turns out there’s an order to the state of knowledge, an explanation for how we know what we know. Samuel Arbesman is an expert in the field of scientometrics—literally the science of science.

In hi book, The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date, Arbesman delves into this discussion in depth.

Tyler Cowen says of the book, “What does it mean to live in a world drowning in facts? Consider The Half-life of Facts the new go-to book on the evolution of science and technology.”

According to Arbesman, the technological revolution we’re currently experiencing is not a one-off, technology has been changing over the centuries. But what’s surprising is that if you look below the surface you discover that this progress is not random or erratic, it almost always follows a pattern. And understanding this pattern helps us to appreciate far more than faster download speeds or Moore's Law; it helps us to understand something fundamental to our success as a species. It helps us to understand how our knowledge changes and evolves.

Knowl­edge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives.

Doctors with a rough idea of when their knowledge is likely to expire can be better equipped 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 and when language changes, each of us can better bridge generational gaps in slang and dialect.

For instance, Chris Magee, a professor at MIT, has measured technological changes. Along with his postdoctoral fellow, Heebyung Koh, he compiled a vast data set of all the different instances of information transformation that have occurred throughout history. By chronicling one technology after another – from calculations done by hand in 1892 that clocked in at a little under one calculation a minute to today’s machines – Magee uncovered a pattern. As Arbesman explains, despite the differences among all of these technologies, human brains, punch cards, vacuum tubes, integrated circuits, the overall increase in humanity’s ability to perform calculations has progressed quite smoothly and extremely quickly. Put together, there has been a roughly exponential progress in our information transformation abilities over time.

Arbesman takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a few years, or over the span of centuries. He shows that much of what we know consists of “mesofacts”—facts that change at a middle timescale, often over a single human lifetime. Throughout, he of­fers intriguing examples about the face of knowledge: what English majors can learn from a statistical analysis of The Canterbury Tales, why it’s so hard to measure a mountain, and why so many parents still tell kids to eat their spinach because it’s rich in iron.

The Half-life of Facts is a riveting journey into the counter-intuitive fabric of knowledge. It can help us find new ways to measure the world while accepting the limits of how much we can know with certainty. —

Click here to download the first chapter of the Half-life of Facts.

SOURCE  BBC Future

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