The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.81 (874 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B009EDCRN2 |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 490 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-08-10 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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. 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. It can help us find new ways to measure the world while accepting the limits of how much we can know with certainty.. Just as we know that a chunk of uranium can break down in a measurable amount of time - a radioactive half-life - so too any given field's change in knowledge can be measured concretely. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. Samuel Arbesman is an expert in the field of scientometrics - literally the science of science. Facts change all the time. Doctors with a rough idea of when their knowledge is likely to expire can be better equipped to keep up with the latest research. For decades, we were convinced that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. We can know when facts in aggregate are obsolete, the rate at which new facts are created, and even how facts spread. Companies and governments that understand how long new discoveries take to develop can improve decisions about allocating resources. 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 measur
"Enjoyable" according to ubpdqn. I enjoyed this book and I believe it provides an important insight. It fits well with Thinking, fast and slow (Kahneman). The author starts with a deliberately fuzzy/loose pragmatic definition of "fact" and proceeds to explore the quantitative aspects of evolution (or temporal characteristics) of knowledge and information. He uses mathematical and statistical tool. Rod Bell said Better concept than execution. It's a good idea about a true state of affairs, but maybe a trade book just can't do justice to this topic and the author's overarching hypotheses. It would take a tremendous amount of research and scholarship to support, or discard, Mr. Arbesman's hypotheses about the "facts" that society, especially "science," "knows." --Yes, that's a lot of scare quotes for the. Interesting, but could have been better Do you want to know how scientists get ever closer to the truth? This book goes into that, and it does so in an interesting and engaging way.But the discussion is somewhat incomplete. The author does not go into scientific fraud, even though there has been a number of high profile science fraud cases in recent years. I would have loved to have seen a discussion on