The Half-Life of Facts can help us find new ways to measure the woorld while accepting the limits of how much we can know with certainty.
Samuel Arbesman is an applied mathematician and network scientist.
He is a Senior Scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and
a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at
Harvard University. His writing has appeared in the New York Times,
the Atlantic, Wired, New Scientist and the Boston Globe. He lives
in Kansas City.
Visit www.arbesman.net
“The Half-Life of Facts is easily one of the best books of the year
on science.”
—Bloomberg
“Delightfully nerdy.”
—The Wall Street Journal
"Absorbing and approachable treatise on the nature of facts: what
they are, how and why they change and how they sometimes don’t
(despite being wrong)…Facts matter. But when they change—as they
seem today to do with alarming frequency, we begin to lose that
control. In his debut, Arbesman…advises us not to worry: While we
can’t stop facts from changing, we can recognize that what we know
“changes in understandable and systematic ways.”… With this, he
introduces “scientometrics,” the science of science. With
scientometrics, we can measure the exponential growth of facts, how
long it will take, exponentially, for knowledge in any field to be
disproved—say, 45 years for medical knowledge…like a good college
professor, Arbesman’s enthusiasm and humor maintains our interest
in subjects many readers may not have encountered before…[The
Half-Life of Facts] does what popular science should do—both
engages and entertains."
—Kirkus Reviews
“How many chromosomes do we have? How high is Mount Everest? Is
spinach as good for you as Popeye thought—and what scientific
blunder led him to think so in the first place?The Half-life of
Facts is fun and fascinating, filled with wide-ranging stories
and subtle insights about how facts are born, dance their dance,
and die. In today’s world, where knowledge often changes faster
than we do, Samuel Arbesman’s new book is essential reading.”
—Steven Strogatz, professor of mathematics, Cornell University, and
author of The Joy of X
“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.”
—Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, George Mason University, and
author of An Economist Gets Lunch
“The Half-life of Facts is a rollicking intellectual journey.
Samuel Arbesman shares his extensive knowledge with infectious
enthusiasm and entertaining prose. Even if the facts around us are
ever changing, the lessons and fun in this book will have a very
long half-life!”
—Michael J. Mauboussin, chief investment strategist, Legg Mason
Capital Management, and author of The Success Equation
“The Half-life of Facts teaches you that it is possible, in
fact, to drink from a firehose. Samuel Arbesman, an extremely
creative scientist and storyteller, explores the paradox that
knowledge is tentative in particularly consistent ways. In his
capable hands, we learn about everything from how medieval
manuscripts resemble genetic code to what bacteria and computer
chips have in common. This book unravels the mystery of how we
come to know the truth—and how long we can be certain about
it.”
—Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, coauthor of Connected
"Facts fall apart, some famously so. Brontosaurus is not a real
dinosaur species; Pluto is not a planet. When you look at them en
masse, patterns emerge: Facts die, and are born, at specific,
predictable rates. These rates are the subject of applied
mathematician Samuel Arbesman’s engaging, insightful jaunt across
the backstage of scientific knowledge. Packed with interesting
tidbits—for instance, more than a third of mammals thought to have
gone extinct in the last 500 years have since reappeared—the book
explains how facts spread and change over time. It also explores
how today’s data-soaked reality has yielded high-throughput,
automated ways to produce new truths, like algorithms that discover
connections between genes and disease."
—Veronique Greenwood, Discover magazine
"Knowledge shifts over time, explains Sam Arbesman in The
Half-Life of Facts, and it does so in predictable ways. The book
takes us on a whirlwind tour of emerging fields of scientometrics,
and undertakes a broader exploration of metaknowledge. Arbesman
details how researchers beginning to focus the big-data lens back
on science itself are uncovering quantitative laws and
regularities in the way that scientific knowledge is constructed
and modified over time….Arbesman is a delightful guide to the
territory, patently in love with this emerging field. He is also a
skilled storyteller, and his wide-eyed reporting invigorates
material that could have been dry and academic."
—Carl Bergstrom, Nature magazine
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