The Half-Life of Facts (31 page)

CHAPTER 2: THE PACE OF DISCOVERY

9      
When Derek J. de Solla Price arrived:
Garfield, Eugene. “A Tribute to Derek John de Solla Price: A Bold, Iconoclastic Historian of
Science.” In
Essays of an Information Scientist
, ISI Press. Vol. 7, p. 213.

12      
Price published his findings:
Price, Derek J. de Solla. “Quantitative Measures of the Development of Science.”
Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences
4, no. 14 (1951): 85–93.

13      
Little Science, Big Science:
Price, Derek J. de Solla.
Little Science, Big Science—and Beyond
. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

13      
Harvey Lehman published a curious little paper:
Lehman, Harvey C. “The Exponential Increase of Man’s Cultural Output.”
Social Forces
25, no. 3 (March 1, 1947): 281–90.

14      
along with a few more recent areas examined:
Enquist, M., et al. “Why Does Human Culture Increase Exponentially?”
Theoretical Population Biology
74 (2008): 46–55.

16      
A group of researchers at Harvard Medical School:
Lee, Kyungjoon, John S. Brownstein, Richard G. Mills, and Isaac S. Kohane. “Does Collocation Inform the Impact of Collaboration?”
PLoS ONE
5, no. 12 (December 15, 2010): e14279.

16      
a group of researchers at Northwestern University:
Wuchty, Stefan, et al. “The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge.”
Science
316, no. 5827 (May 18, 2007): 1036–39.

17      
It was created by Jorge Hirsch:
Hirsch, Jorge E. “An Index to Quantify an Individual’s Scientific Research Output.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
102, no. 46 (November 15, 2005): 16569–72.

17      
The National Science Foundation has examined how much money:
Lehrer, Jonah. “Fleeting Youth, Fading Creativity.”
Wall Street Journal
, February 19, 2010.

18      
decided to study the scientific output of Nobel laureates:
Zuckerman, Harriet. “Nobel Laureates in Science: Patterns of Productivity, Collaboration, and Authorship.”
American Sociological Review
32, no. 3 (1967): 391–403.

20      
the distorted words we often have to read correctly:
This is known as the reCAPTCHA project and can be found here: www.google.com/recaptcha.

21      
eurekometrics:
Arbesman, Samuel, and Nicholas A. Christakis. “Eurekometrics: Analyzing the Nature of Discovery.”
PLoS Computational Biology
7, no. 6 (June 2011): e1002072.

22      
the sizes of asteroids discovered annually:
More precisely, the dates used were for multi-opposition observations, required for a high level of accuracy of computing orbits. The date of discovery is a less stringent threshold when it comes to asteroids, so this analysis simply uses a more stringent criterion.

23      
“In the 1940s there are six such moments”:
Cowen, Tyler. “The Great Stagnation in Medicine.”
Marginal Revolution
,
2011. www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/02/the-great-stagnation-in-medicine.xhtml.

23      
a Swedish medical student named Ivar Sandström:
Carney, J. Aidan. “The Glandulae Parathyroideae of Ivar Sandström: Contributions from Two Continents.”
American Journal of Surgical Pathology
20, no. 9 (1996): 1123–44.

24      
if you uttered the statement:
Price.
Little Science, Big Science
.

CHAPTER 3: THE ASYMPTOTE OF TRUTH

26      
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young woman in South Africa:
Goodall, Jane, Gail Hudson, and Thane Maynard.
Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink
. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009.

27      
an example of what are known as Lazarus taxa:
Intriguingly, since the discovery of living coelacanths, fossil coelacanths have been found from the past sixty-five million years. Personal communication with Brian Switek.

28      
two biologists at the University of Queensland in Australia:
Fisher, Diana O., and Simon P. Blomberg. “Correlates of Rediscovery and the Detectability of Extinction in Mammals.”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
(September 29, 2010).

28      
a team of scientists at a hospital in Paris:
Poynard, Thierry, et al. “Truth Survival in Clinical Research: An Evidence-Based Requiem?”
Annals of Internal Medicine
136, no. 12 (2002): 888–95.

28      
a clear decay in the number of papers that were still valid:
This decay is a relatively smooth linear decline, so we might need many more years of data to fit it nicely to an exponential decay. In addition, while the term “half-life” is used by the authors of this paper, its usage here might appropriately be a bit metaphorical, rather than mathematically literal.

31      
towering well above other publications
: Sometimes they become so important that they actually stop being cited. Newton’s work is foundational for physics to such a large degree that it has become unnecessary to cite his books.

32      
a study of all the papers in the Physical Review journals:
Redner, Sidney. “Citation Statistics from More Than a Century of Physical Review” (2004). http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0407137.

32      
Other researchers have even broken this down by subfield:
Midorikawa, N. “Citation Analysis of Physics Journals: Comparison of Subfields of Physics.”
Scientometrics
5, no. 6 (November 26, 1983): 361–74.

32      
In medicine:
Tonta, Yas¸ar, and Yurdagül Ünal. “Scatter of Journals and Literature Obsolescence Reflected in Document Delivery
Requests.”
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
56, no. 1 (2005): 84–94; doi:10.1002/asi.20114.

32      
Price himself examined journals from different fields:
Price, Derek J. de Solla. “Citation Measures of Hard Science, Soft Science, Technology, and Nonscience.” In
Communication Among Scientists and Engineers
, eds. C. E. Nelson and D. K. Pollock. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1970. pp. 3–22.

32      
Rong Tang looked at scholarly books in different fields:
Tang, Rong. “Citation Characteristics and Intellectual Acceptance of Scholarly Monographs.”
College Research Libraries
69, no. 4 (2008): 356–69.

33      
three scientists working at the Thermophysical Research Properties Center at Purdue University:
Ho, C. Y., R. W. Powell, and P. E. Liley. “Thermal Conductivity of the Elements.”
Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data
1, no. 2 (April 1972): 279–421.

35      
Issac Asimov, in a wonderful essay:
Asimov, Isaac.
The Relativity of Wrong
. Pinnacle Books: New York, 1989.

36      
Sean Carroll…wrote a wonderful series on his blog:
Carroll, Sean. “The Laws Underlying the Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood.”
Cosmic Variance
, 2010; http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood.

37      
Carroll even lays down, in a single equation:
This is known as the Dirac equation. Carroll, Sean. “Physics and the Immortality of the Soul.”
Cosmic Variance
, 2010; http://blogs.discover magazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/23/physics-and-the-immortality-of-the-soul/.

37      
A quote from
Science Daily:
Census of Marine Life. “Giant Undersea Microbial Mat Among Discoveries Revealed by Marine Life Census.”
Science Daily
, April 18, 2010.

38      
Kevin Kelly refers to this sort of distribution:
Kelly, Kevin. “The Long Tail of Life.”
The Technium
, 2010; http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2010/04/the_long_tail_o.php.

CHAPTER 4: MOORE’S LAW OF EVERYTHING

41      
The @ symbol has been on keyboards:
Rawsthorn, Alice. “Why @ Is Held in Such High Design Esteem.”
International Herald Tribune
, March 22, 2010.

42      
Moore wrote a short paper in the journal
Electronics:
Moore, Gordon E. “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits” (Reprinted from
Electronics
, pg 114–17, April 19, 1965).
Proceedings of the IEEE
86, no. 1 (1998): 82–85.

43      
number of pixels that digital cameras can process:
Myhrvold, Nathan. “Moore’s Law Corollary: Pixel Power.”
New York Times
, June 7, 2006.

43      
Magee, along with a postdoctoral fellow Heebyung Koh:
Koh, Heebyung, and Christopher L. Magee. “A Functional Approach for Studying Technological Progress: Application to Information Technology.”
Technological Forecasting and Social Change
73, no. 9 (2006): 1061–83; Koh, Heebyung, and Christopher L. Magee. “A Functional Approach for Studying Technological Progress: Extension to Energy Technology.”
Technological Forecasting and Social Change
75, no. 6 (2008): 735–58.

45      
They begin to run out of space:
This growth pattern assumes a continuous food supply.

45      
Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School:
Christensen, Clayton M. “Exploring the Limits of the Technology S-Curve. Part I: Component Technologies.”
Production and Operations Management
1, no. 4 (1992): 334–57.

46      
they found mathematical regularities:
More recent research has debated whether these are truly exponential or other fast-growing functions, such as power laws or double exponentials. The upshot is the same: There are regularities. See McNerney, James, et al. “Role of Design Complexity in Technology Improvement.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
108, no. 22 (May 31, 2011): 9008–13; Nagy, Béla, et al. “Superexponential Long-term Trends in Information Technology.”
Technological Forecasting and Social Change
78, no. 8 (October 2011): 1356–64. For more curves, see the performance curve database: http://pcdb.santafe.edu.

46      
has even been found in robots:
Powell, Corey S. “The Rise of the Machines Is Not Going as We Expected.”
Discover
(May 2010).

46      
Kevin Kelly, in his book
What Technology Wants:
Kelly, Kevin.
What Technology Wants
. New York: Viking, 2010.

48      
If you plot prefix sizes against the years:
Personal research. Underlying data from Bureau International des Poids et Mesures.
The International System of Units
, 2006.

48      
cost of genome sequencing is dropping rapidly:
MacArthur, Daniel. “The Plummeting Cost of Genome Sequencing.”
Wired Science
, 2011. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/illustrating-the-plummeting-cost-of-genome-sequencing.

48      
These technological doublings in the realm of science:
Mathematics also has such doublings. For example, the number of digits of the largest known prime number has increased exponentially, due to growth in computing power that allows for the discovery of larger and larger primes. Further information available here: http://primes.utm.edu/notes/by_year.xhtml

48      
Moore’s Law of proteomics:
Cox, Jürgen, and Matthias Mann.“Is Proteomics the New Genomics?”
Cell
. Cell Press, August 10, 2007. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867407009701.

48      
the number of neurons that can be:
Stevenson, Ian H., and Konrad P. Kording. “How Advances in Neural Recording Affect Data Analysis.”
Nature Neuroscience
14, no. 2 (February 2011): 139–42.

49      
“Science and technology are closely related”:
Cole, Jonathan R.
The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected
. New York: Public Affairs, 2009.

49      
Henry Petroski, a professor of engineering and history
: Petroski, Henry. “Engineering Is Not Science.”
IEEE Spectrum
9 December 2010.

50      
In 1928, the engineer Trygve Dewey Yensen:
Yensen, T. D. “What Is the Magnetic Permeability of Iron?”
Journal of the Franklin Institute
206, no. 4 (1928): 503–10.

51      
game after game has become:
Cirasella, J. and D. Kopec. “The History of Computer Games.” Exhibit at Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years (AI@50). Conferences, Seminars and Symposiums: Conference Presentation. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, July 13–15, 2006.

52      
polio is now generally regarded:
Unfortunately, polio’s eradication in the developed world is one of our more slippery mesofacts. Polio still exists in developing countries, and due to our globalized world, it still has the potential of spreading to developed countries where it has been eliminated.

53      
while aluminum used to be the most valuable:
Kotler, Steven, and Peter H. Diamandis.
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
. New York: Free Press, 2012.

53      
have added about 0.4 years:
Wolfram|Alpha. “Life Expectancy, United States”; http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+United+States, 2011.