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.2 The Half Life of Knowledge
I want to talk about the concept of the half-life of knowledge. What do we mean by the half-life of knowledge? This is a concept that was stolen from the natural sciences, where they talk about the half-life of radioactive elements. The half-life of radioactive elements refers to how long it takes a radioactive element half of the quantity to decay from one form of the element to another form of the element. In natural elements the half-life is widely variable from a few milliseconds to thousands of years, so you have vast changes in terms of the elemental transformation from that of the original element. I apply this to knowledge by saying that the half-life of knowledge is how long it is before half of the knowledge is obsolete. How long is it before half the knowledge is obsolete? For example, we can look at the knowledge of the brain and how our knowledge of the brain has changed. If we take as our baseline 1970, in 1970 how much did we know about the brain? How much have we learned since the beginning of time? How much knowledge had accumulated about the brain? That is our baseline. Ninety percent of what we knew about the brain in 1980 we had learned since 1970. In other words not half of what you knew about the brain was out of date, but 90 percent of what was known about the brain was new since 1970. That is an enormous change in ten years. Now it gets worse because in 1985 ninety-five percent of the knowledge of the brain had been discovered since 1980. Remember that what we knew in 1980, ninety percent of that was new from 1970. You take all of that which we knew in 1980 and all that knowledge became five percent of what we knew in 1985. In the 1970's we had learned new ways to study the brain. Until 1970 the brain was kind of a glob up there that was too esoteric to understand and then we developed new technologies to study the brain. We learned that women think in different parts of their brains than men do.
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No Parrot Question | |
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How would the half-life of knowledge affect the curriculum of Mr. Spears, a ninth-grade Biology teacher at Westwood High School? |
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