Book Review "The Half-Life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman"

This blog post is written by an English/TOK teacher at the Antwerp International School. It is a very interesting book review about people who are interested in TOK and/or philosophy. The StudentElite team thanks Mr. Carlier dearly for this book review.

"The Half-Life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman

This is a fairly quick read that makes a complex idea accessible because the writer uses such clear, unpretentious language. Samuel Arbesman is a mathematician (he calls himself a “complexity scientist) who is interested in studying how knowledge grows, changes and becomes obsolete. His main argument is that, like atoms, facts have a “half-life”, and that there is a predictable pattern to how knowledge changes. In his concluding chapter, he sums up his thesis as follows:

…facts can change in a startlingly complex variety of ways. But far from the fluctuation in our knowledge being random, the changes are systematic and predictable. Whether about nature or about the man-made

world, factual change due to measurement changes or even the identification of errors, facts change in recognisably regular ways. (Arbesman, 208)

This is a great read for Theory of Knowledge students. Each chapter has a direct and relevant link to TOK, and Arbesman constantly illustrates his ideas with interesting examples, making this a really useful source for finding original real life situations needed for your presentations and essays. He also points the reader to TOK-relevant further reading, such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (the writer who coined the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ in the 1960s), Snopes.com and Wikipedia’s own “List of common misconceptions” page. He even promotes an gadget that interacts with changing knowledge and facts: the “Stock Orb” by Ambient Devices, which turns green or red depending on how the stock market (or other data sets) change. Highly recommended reading for TOK students, or anyone interested in learning more about how scientists and mathematicians view, analyse and predict how knowledge changes over time."

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Timo Carlier

English/TOK/Homeroom Teacher at Antwerp International School

Veltwijcklaan 180 | 2180 Antwerpen | België