""The Half-Life of Facts "is easily one of the best books of the year on science.""--Bloomberg" "Delightfully nerdy.""--The Wall Street Journal" "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."--"Kirkus Reviews" "How many chromosomes do we have? How high is Mount Everest? Is spinach as good for you as Popeye thought--and what scientific blunder led him to think so in the first place?"The Half-life of Facts" is fun and fascinating, filled with wide-ranging stories and subtle insights about how facts are born, dance their dance, and die. In today's world, where knowledge often changes faster than we do, Samuel Arbesman's new book is essential reading."--Steven Strogatz, professor of mathematics, Cornell University, and author of "The Joy of X" "What does it mean to live in a world drowning in facts? Consider "The Half-life of Facts "the new go-to book on the evolution of science and technology."--Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, George Mason University, and author of "An Economist Gets Lunch" ""The Half-life of Facts" is a ro

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. His writing has appeared in the "New York Times, " the "Atlantic"," Wired, New Scientist "and the "Boston""Globe." He lives in Kansas City. Visit www.arbesman.net