Half-life of knowledge

The half-life of knowledge is the amount of time that has to elapse before half of the knowledge in a particular area is superseded or shown to be untrue. The concept is attributed to Fritz Machlup (1962). For example, Donald Hebb estimated the half-life of psychology to be five years.

The half-life of knowledge differs from the concept of half-life in physics in that there is no guarantee that the truth of knowledge in a particular area of study is declining exponentially. It is unclear that there is any way to establish what constitutes "knowledge" in a particular area, as opposed to mere opinion or theory.

This is similar to the concept of a half-life of facts coined by Samuel Arbesman, a Harvard mathematician[1] and scholar at the Kaufmann Foundation.[2]

Because scientific knowledge is growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, this means that half of what scientists may have known about a particular subject will be wrong or obsolete in 45 years.[2]

See also

References

  1. ↑ R.D.A. (28 November 2012). "The half-life of facts". Retrieved 19 February 2015. Samuel Arbesman, a mathematician at Harvard, calls this "The Half-life of Facts", the title of his new book. In it he explains that this churn of knowledge is like radioactive decay: you cannot predict which individual fact is going to succumb to it, but you can know how long it takes for half the facts in a discipline to become obsolete. Such quantitative analysis of science has become known as scientometrics.
  2. 1 2 Bailey, Ronald (2 October 2012). "Half of the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong". reason.com. Archived from the original on 19 February 2015. Retrieved 19 February 2015.

Further reading


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