Why everything we know has an expiration date. By Samuel Arbesman.
As if to confirm (or perhaps to inform) my current writing, along comes "The Half-Life of Facts"
The book goes so far to say that in any field, half of all the facts will be obsolete, outdated or wrong on a very predictable time table. It goes into the causes and consequences of this.
It argues that there re degrees of truth. Or perhaps that some truths are more useful than others. Both flat-earth believes and Earth-is-round-but-the-center-of-the-universe believers are wrong, but not in the same way. Also, the truth that each person believed was good enough for the time. At the time of the flat-earth, we didn't have to pilot jets around the globe, or much data about the orbits of the earth around the stars.
Going forward, much of what we know, will be outdated, obsolete or wrong in time.
Progress is made by finding which ideas are wrong and replacing these wrongs with better ideas. Ideas then must be testable. Truth must not be clung to.
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