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Knowledge, like milk, has an expiry date. That’s the key message behind Samuel Arbesman’s excellent new book The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date.
We’re bombarded with studies that seemingly prove this or that. Caffeine is good for you one day and bad for you the next. What we think we know and understand about the world is constantly changing. Nothing is immune. While big ideas are overturned infrequently, little ideas churn regularly.
As scientific knowledge grows, we end up rethinking old knowledge. Abresman calls this “a churning of knowledge.” But understanding that facts change (and how they change) helps us cope in a world of constant uncertainty. We can never be too sure of what we know.
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