Introducing "The Half-Life of Facts"

My book The Half-Life of Facts, about the science behind how knowledge changes, is coming out next week and I am very excited about it! It brings together a number of different fields of science and mathematics to explore the regularities behind how what we know grows and changes as we improve our understanding of the universe.

From Kirkus Reviews:

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.

I have a number of adapted articles and essays about the book running in various outlets in the coming weeks, so feel free to follow me on Twitter to keep apprised of these.

Andpre-order the book now.