Half Life of Facts
I’ve always been happy that we engineers don’t have to get additional degrees beyond the B.E. or B.Tech., and that we don’t need to recertify ourselves periodically. 4 years of college and we are done. At the same time, I’ve felt sorry for doctors who (at least in the West) need to get themselves recertified periodically. My mom felt everyone does update themselves, even if it’s not always via a new degree. Surely, she said, all professionals read up new stuff and stay upto date, especially when their job demands it. Don’t engineers learn new programming languages and ways to speed up constructions, she asked? I think I found the answer when I read this Farnam Street analysis about the book, “ The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date ”, by Samuel Arbesman. Here’s the theme of that book: “Knowledge is like radioactivity. If you look at a single atom of uranium, whether it’s going to decay — breaking down and unleashing its energy — is highly unpre...