1,411 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock You Sideways

Description

In 2013, a Harvard mathematician called Samuel Arbesman wrote a book called The Half-Life of Facts, in which he compares facts to uranium atoms. Individually, their lifespan is unpredictable, but when they are lumped together we can accurately predict that half the atoms will decay within 4.47 billion years the so-called half-life of uranium 238. Facts, it turns out, also have a half-life, and most of them don't last nearly as long. For example, it's only a few hundred years since everybody agreed that the Sun went around the Earth. Only half a century ago, doctors thought smoking was good for you. Less than ten years ago, it was a 'fact' that Pluto was a planet, until it was downgraded by the International Astronomical Union in 2006. Arbesman is an expert in scientometrics the science of science and he has shown that the time it takes to overturn half of any given body of knowledge can be measured. The subject with the longest half-life is mathematics, much of which, alone among human knowledge, appears to be immortal. Alarmingly, one of the shortest lived disciplines is medicine-where can be shown that half of what doctors believe to be true will be proven wrong within 45 years. The problem is, of course, they don't know which half. Information is fleeting. Human records are broken; new particles are discovered; fresh historical documents come to light. Dinosaurs turn out not to be giant gray iguanas after all, but multicolored feathery proto-birds of all shapes and sizes. Right now, even the daddy of all facts, the Big Bang theory, is looking wobbly. ISBN:9780393249873