The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date - Hardcover

Samuel Arbesman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 159184472X ISBN 13: 9781591844723

Publisher: Current, 2012

Synopsis

Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. It used to be thought the Earth was the centre of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. What is known about the world is constantly changing. There is 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. Knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably and this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on human life.

About this title

Review:

'Delightfully nerdy.' -- --Wall Street Journal

About the Author:

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. In addition, he is a contributor to Wired.com and his essays about math and science have appeared in such places as the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. Arbesman's first book, The Half-Life of Facts (Current/Penguin), is about how knowledge changes over time.

About this edition

• Publisher: Current
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 159184472X
• ISBN 13: 9781591844723
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256